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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    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Great Impostor
    An amusing, and occasionally fascinating, comedy-drama about the career of one of the most amazing—and likable—contemporary charlatans, Ferdinand W. Demara Jr.
  2. It Happened on Fifth Avenue
    They took that dog-earred story of the hard-hearted millionaire given a lesson in human relations by a kindly disposed vagabond and they dressed it up in such trimmings as to make it look almost fresh. And they found themselves fortunately supported by a charming performance from Victor Moore.
  3. Poupelle of Chimney Town
    Trying to get a read on the film — while admiring its palette and off-kilter character details (Lubicchi has an odd vampire overbite) — keeps “Poupelle” fun for a while. But the film ultimately shies away from its most disturbing ideas, falling back on a comforting sentimentality.
  4. Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 u (a SOUR film)
    As a performance piece, “Driving Home 2 U” is an exhilarating and intimate showcase for Rodrigo, as commentary about her album’s tracks spills seamlessly, in musical-theater fashion, into “Sour” tunes. Songs are newly arranged and presented in some breathtakingly scenic spots.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Red Dust
    The atmosphere of this tale is more interesting than its story, especially the glimpses of the men at work.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Snoopy Come Home
    This sprightly, clever and hilarious treat—all that a comic strip should be on the screen—is even better than "A Boy Named Charlie Brown," which began the series.
  7. Perpetrator
    Screwy and strange, Perpetrator is gleefully unsubtle, but its ensanguinated excess is part of the fun.
  8. Dandelion
    In the end, Dandelion feels like one artist’s emotional prequel, leaving us wishing for even more.
  9. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    Compassionate though it is, this is not a movie that offers much in the way of solace. It insists that there is no end to human weakness, and not much cure for it either. That's pretty strong stuff.
  10. Pieces of a Woman
    Set over eight harrowing months, Pieces of a Woman is a ragged, mesmerizing study of rupture and reconstruction. The ending is ill-judged, but the movie understands that while we love in common, we grieve alone.
  11. Strange Days
    Only when it comes time to justify its excesses and deliver on a promise of wider revelation does the otherwise audacious screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks look too specific and small.
  12. The Sky Is Everywhere
    Too many works aimed at younger age groups ooze with sentimentality or buckle under a condescending tone. Here, in figurative voice-over full of imagery, we receive Lennie’s unbridled imagination and worldview.
  13. American Teen
    This is the kind of movie the people in it might have made, which means that its revelatory power as an investigation of teenage life in America is limited.
  14. Carlito's Way
    Carlito's Way is best watched as lively, colorful posturing and as a fine demonstration of this director's bravura visual style.
  15. Byzantium
    Again and again, as the story shifts between women, times and moods, Mr. Jordan adds a punctuating flourish...that exquisitely illustrates the once-upon-a-time mood.
  16. Slack Bay
    As it turns out, modes of farce and fantasy enable Mr. Dumont to pull the rug out from under the viewer in a number of new and upsetting ways. Be prepared.
  17. The Edge
    There's no need to worry that Mamet is on foreign territory with this action premise. The Edge succeeds ably in blending his famously acerbic dialogue with nerve-racking adventure scenes.
  18. The Dark Crystal
    The Dark Crystal aims, I think, to be a sort of Muppet Paradise Lost but winds up as watered down J.R.R. Tolkien.
  19. Jackass Number Two
    Debased, infantile and reckless in the extreme, this compendium of body bravado and malfunction makes for some of the most fearless, liberated and cathartic comedy in modern movies.
  20. Talk Radio
    A mess of a movie that comes complete with a conventional beginning, middle and end, and long, spongy flashbacks...a nearly perfect example of how not to make a movie of a play.
  21. Margot at the Wedding
    Frequently brilliant, finally baffling film.
  22. Crimson Tide
    Crimson Tide is better watched for its toy appeal and high-priced talent than for any real suspense over where Hunter's mutinous instincts will lead the story.
  23. Advanced Style
    Advanced Style is undeniably captivating, even uplifting at times. But Mr. Cohen and Lina Plioplyte, the director, present a disconcerting mixed message.
  24. White Noise
    There is something detached about the film, a succession of moods and notions that are often quite interesting but that never entirely cohere. White Noise is an expression of sincere and admirable faith. I just wish I could believe in it.
  25. Pelican Dreams
    Judy Irving injects just enough of herself into her Pelican Dreams to distinguish this sweet film from an episode of the PBS series “Nature.”
  26. Afterward
    The resulting emotions are complex, and Bloch, here directing her first feature, can be excused for allowing a few of the scenes to stray. But by the end of the documentary, she and many of her subjects posit that it’s possible to learn from history and to change, and to trust each other a little more.
  27. Carmen
    Writer and director Valerie Buhagiar makes the wise decision to orient her film toward what’s pleasurable rather than what’s logical. The Maltese countryside sparkles in the sunlight, and McElhone delights with a charming and slightly loopy performance as the irreverent spiritual leader.
  28. Roofman
    Here is a protagonist who clearly straddles the line between right and wrong; the trouble is that in Roofman, that line wobbles, leaving the movie somewhere between a fun-loving caper and a finger-wagging morality tale.
  29. Winter in Wartime
    Winter in Wartime turns into a moderately gripping thriller with predictable plot twists and reversals.
  30. Shall We Dance?
    And the dancing, as in ''Strictly Ballroom,'' is filmed with a wishful Fred-and-Ginger sweetness that gives the film a studiously effervescent mood.
  31. Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers
    A wry take on the material that combines animation and live-action comedy, the movie has some of the hip flair and anarchic meta-humor of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” as well as an irreverent, self-referential attitude that’s rather appealing.
  32. Scream
    Wes Craven (of the 'Nightmare on Elm Street' films) is in the mood for parody.
  33. Wish Me Away
    This scrappy-slick confessional is a fascinating study in dualities.
  34. Swan Song
    Any mind-bending conceit or special effect pales before Ali’s incredibly fine-tuned talents.
  35. Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy
    “Desperate Souls” convincingly argues that there’s no other time at which Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) could have become enduring movie characters, let alone have the tenderness between them depicted so subtly.
  36. Maelstrom
    Probably the first romantic drama ever narrated by a smelly dead fish.
  37. Beautiful Boxer
    A rare hybrid: an underdog sports picture that's also a transgender fairy tale.
  38. Kick-Ass
    Ms. Moretz is by far the best thing about the film: she holds the screen as gracefully as she executes a running back flip.
  39. Littlerock
    It's significantly smaller and more casual than "Mystery Train" or "Lost in Translation," movies its premise calls to mind, but in some ways it's more layered and complex.
  40. The Snowtown Murders
    The Snowtown Murders reminds us that sometimes evil is immediately recognizable, but at other times it comes bearing bacon and beer.
  41. Harvest of Empire
    The filmmakers retain a touching faith that most Americans won't tolerate injustice when they know about it. This film is meant to teach them.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Jazz Singer
    The Vitaphoned songs and some dialogue have been introduced most adroitly. This in itself is an ambitious move, for in the expression of song the Vitaphone vitalizes the production enormously. The dialogue is not so effective, for it does not always catch the nuances of speech or inflections of the voice so that one is not aware of the mechanical features.
  43. King of New York
    Mr. Walken, as Frank, does a memorable job of taking a fanciful projection of corruption, greed and complacency, giving it intelligence, and making it flesh and blood.
  44. Liquid Sky
    It's the overall resourcefulness of Mr. Tsukerman and his talented colleagues that gives Liquid Sky its high style. Visually bright and arresting, with a varied and insinuating electronic score, the film is full of eye-catching images.
  45. The Real Charlie Chaplin
    The tell-all promise of the film’s title dwindles away into predictable perspectives from members of his family. But this introduction to Chaplin shines whenever he performs, displaying his comic genius for doing everything wrong to absolute perfection.
  46. A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
    In fact even the film's most dramatic moments are presented with decorousness bordering on detachment.
  47. Mean Girls
    The director, Mark Waters, working with a smart casting team, has assembled a superb group of players. Scene by scene you can't help being impressed by Mean Girls; it's like a group of sketches linked by a theme, with some playing much better than others.
  48. Transamerica
    Transamerica itself does not always live up to its star, but it is touching and sometimes funny, despite its overall air of indie earnestness.
  49. Notorious C.H.O.
    Brilliant, over-the-edge concert film Notorious C.H.O. carries candid sexual humor into previously uncharted territory.
  50. The Tailor of Panama
    The first really good spy movie about the impossibility, under present historical circumstances, of making a really good spy movie.
  51. Moulin Rouge!
    Simultaneously stirring and dispiriting.
  52. Philadelphia
    In the end, thanks to such effects and to the simple grace of Mr. Hanks's performance, this film does accomplish what it means to. Philadelphia rises above its flaws to convey the full urgency of its difficult subject, and to bring that subject home.
  53. Sidewalk Stories
    Even more impressive than the tact, warmth and humor of Sidewalk Stories is the fact that it exists at all. Mr. Lane has flown quite fearlessly in the face of fashion, and done this so confidently that any comparisons with Chaplin deserve to be appreciative.
  54. Ultraman: Rising
    If Ultraman wants to conquer the world, he’ll have to try something livelier than a cartoon that looks like a kids movie but lurches about like a saccharine family drama.
  55. Dumb Money
    An energetic, ingratiating dramatization of the GameStop stock craze of 2021.
  56. The Good Dinosaur
    The Good Dinosaur is charmingly different, but its oddness sneaks up on you only after the filmmakers lay out some storybook bona fides.
  57. Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
    In her director's statement for Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, Gail O'Hara writes that "this one's for the fans." Rarely has that been more true.
  58. The Border
    Although it has been made with intelligence, is well directed and acted and is in touch with the ways of lower-middle-class American life, it has the sort of predictable outrage and shape of a made-for-television movie. It has suspense but little excitement.
  59. A Soldier's Story
    Mr. Jewison, filming mainly at Fort Chaffee, Ark., has opened up the play by using such interiors as the bar where the troops hang out and exteriors on and around the base. But perhaps most commendably, he has let Mr. Fuller's drama speak for itself, applying the skills of a film maker to polish the facets that lent such substance to the drama.
  60. Miami Vice
    Mixing pop savvy with startling formal ambition, Mr. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle.
  61. Skinamarink
    Ingeniously evoking a child’s response to the inexplicable, Skinamarink sways on the border between dreaming and wakefulness, a movie as difficult to penetrate as it is to forget
  62. The Archies
    It’s an extravagant stunt perked up by moments of absurdity.
  63. Breaking
    It depicts in stomach-churning detail how the contemporary militarization of law enforcement creates an atmosphere in which violence is near inevitable. This conscientious attention balances out the movie’s occasional lapses into sentimentality.
  64. The Revolutionary Optimists
    As heartening as it is to see a slum child tutored about vicious cycles of adversity and using the buzzword “partnership” with aplomb, the film comes to feel cut and dried.
  65. Midsummer in Newtown
    Some tragedies defy conventional representation. Unlike the play it documents, this documentary shows few signs of thinking outside the box.
  66. Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone
    When the material is condensed, nearly everything that made the first two-thirds of the television series distinctive _ — the deliberate pace, the wry humor, the subtle (for anime) characterizations — is lost. “Evangelion” becomes just another giant-robot story.
  67. Influencer
    Harder has made good and entertaining use of a premise that could have become a simple gimmick, and Naud and Saper prove strong leads as their characters try to read each other between the likes.
  68. Paris, je t'aime
    A cinematic tasting menu consisting entirely of amuse-bouches. After two hours of such tidbits the palate is sated. But if there is no need for a main course, you still leave feeling vaguely disappointed at not being served one.
  69. Pavarotti
    This is a film too enamored of its subject to pry very deeply. And yet, it’s hard not to be enamored as well, as Pavarotti’s larger-than-life personality shines in almost every scene.
  70. La Vie en Rose
    La Vie en Rose, which Mr. Dahan wrote as well as directed, has an intricate structure, which is a polite way of saying that it's a complete mess... In the end, as often happens in movies of this kind, La Vie en Rose is saved by Piaf herself.
  71. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    There are, once again, too many busy, uninterestingly staged battles that lean heavily on obvious, sometimes distracting digital sorcery. But there are also pacific, brooding interludes in which the actors — notably Mr. Freeman, an intensely appealing screen presence — remind you that there’s more to Middle-earth than clamor and struggle.
  72. Another Earth
    A coming-of-adulthood story that improbably blends a plaintive drama with romantic longing and far-out science fiction.
  73. Unmade Beds
    An agonizingly familiar refrain, but one that the young Argentine director Alexis Dos Santos relates with such tenderness and with so much ethereal beauty that it feels like something fresh.
  74. Let the Bullets Fly
    At least 30 minutes and several scams too long, the plot passes from amusing to confounding long before the final double-cross.
  75. Mosquita y Mari
    Ms. Pineda and Ms. Troncoso give wonderfully natural performances in which they convey the impulsiveness and insecurity of adolescence. You are uncomfortably reminded of what it feels like to be 15.
  76. E-Team
    A documentary that purports to chronicle the sober and urgent work of those who ferret out human-rights abuses, but instead plays like a portrait of a rather glamorous marriage.
  77. Killer Bees
    The movie is ultimately less about the players or even the engrossingly shot games than the idea of basketball as a tradition, one that imbues lives with meaning and bonds a community.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Road to Rio
    Maybe this is not the funniest picture ever made; maybe it is not even quite as rewarding as some of those earlier journeys, but there are patches in this crazy quilt that are as good and, perhaps, even better than anything the boys have done before.
  79. Mid90s
    Like its hero, Mid90s struggles to figure out what it wants to be, and the struggle makes it interesting as well as occasionally frustrating.
  80. Ich hiess Sabina Spielrein
    However fascinating the source material, there's something less than cinematic about 90 minutes of watching people read letters in front of windows.
  81. Minor Premise
    When a movie that feels this scientifically far-reaching lacks heart, the viewing experience is a dreary, soulless one.
  82. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
    The camera movements are graceful, almost ethereal, yet the objects themselves - with their impastos of organic and inorganic materials, their metaphoric resonances, historical allusions and intimations of war - feel unmistakably weighty.
  83. Swimming with Sharks
    In his six years working for various movie executives, Mr. Huang filed away trenchant observations about great big egos and helpless little assistants. Now he gleefully brings those observations to the screen. His witty, score-settling Swimming With Sharks is the perfect revenge for anyone who has ever been showered with paper clips, compared unfavorably with a bath mat or ordered to place an urgent phone call to somebody who's out white-water rafting with Tom Cruise -- right now! No excuses!
  84. The Amazing Spider-Man
    Mr. Webb's Spider-Man movie works only because he keeps the whole package, at least until the requisite final blowout, tethered to his two appealing leads.
  85. Nixon
    Mr. Stone's compassion for his subject overwhelms his film's false moves. And the barrage of undramatized, undigested data gives way to a much tighter and more artful vision...the film starts snowballing its way to real dramatic power. [20 Dec 1995, p.C11]
    • The New York Times
  86. God Knows Where I Am
    This documentary, coupled with Ms. Aviv’s article, addresses unresolved issues of personal autonomy versus a patient’s inability to protect herself. It will haunt you.
  87. Private Desert
    Muritiba understands that any portrait of masculinity that fixates too intensely on the cruelties and self-denials of machista culture are futile. Instead, he finds grace in stolen moments of tenderness.
  88. A Lion Is in the Streets
    A headlong and dynamic drama about a back-country champion of the poor who permits his political ambitions to pull him down a perilously crooked road.
  89. Premium Rush
    Stuffed with zingers and zippy stunts, it comes with pretty young things of all hues and hair types - few prettier than its lead, Joseph Gordon-Levitt - and start-to-finish clever special effects, none more clever or special than Michael Shannon.
  90. Catfight
    The two leads are mesmerizing, hurling themselves into their physically demented roles with ferocious commitment.
  91. The Convert
    The real star of this Kiwi western is the setting. The lush forests and stark, black sand beaches, shot in locations near those used in “The Piano,” help make The Convert more than a message movie.
  92. Bad Reputation
    The movie chronicles music industry tales of glory and failure. These are dishy, but more interesting is Ms. Jett’s rock ‘n’ roll heart. The stories of how she mentored younger bands are moving.
  93. All of You
    Spanning many years and a lot of relationship tumult, All of You is a weepy, sweeping love story that knows full well that it’s trying to be one. But it never succumbs to cheap execution, and all of that comes down to Goldstein and Poots. They make for a terrific pair.
  94. Stake Land
    This unusually taut sophomore feature from Jim Mickle is more abnormal than most in that its creatures are capable not only of evolving but also of embracing religious fanaticism.
  95. Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America
    It's an honorable introduction to an important figure.
  96. Tommaso
    Tommaso has a different feel than your average variant on Fellini’s “8 ½.” Maybe it’s a sense of shame, something the older film’s Guido hadn’t much of. Whatever it is, it makes Tommaso crackle with ideas and empathy, as Ferrara’s best work always does.
  97. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
    The over-all production is very handsome, and the performances fine, especially Newman, Redford, and Miss Ross, who must be broadly funny and straight, almost simultaneously.
  98. Marshall
    Like his character, Mr. Boseman is the star of this show, while Mr. Gad is the second banana and often comic relief. Both performers are natural showmen who never step on each other’s moment; they’re fun to watch.
  99. Splice
    Mr. Natali, whose earlier films include “Cube,” hasn’t reinvented the horror genre. But with Splice he has done the next best thing with an intelligent movie that, in between its small boos and an occasional hair-raising jolt, explores chewy issues like bioethics, abortion, corporate-sponsored science, commitment problems between lovers and even Freudian-worthy family dynamics.
  100. Thirteen Lives
    This is a pragmatic recounting of a nigh-impossible mission: first, to find the trapped boys, and harder still, to swim them out.
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