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. Effie Gray
    The cinematic equivalent of a Brazilian wax, the movie omits much of the story’s most interesting material to create something that’s been smoothly denatured.
  2. Cheatin'
    Mr. Plympton rewrites the laws of physics at will, but within a rigorous and coherent logic. He conjures a world of absolute improbability that, somehow, makes perfect sense.
  3. Furious 7
    There will no doubt be better movies released in 2015, but Furious 7 is an early favorite to win the prize for most picture.
  4. Ned Rifle
    Even if this minor coda plays to an increasingly closed circle of admirers, it gives the trilogy a pleasing, moving symmetry.
  5. Woman in Gold
    Apart from Ms. Mirren’s performance, Woman in Gold smugly and shamelessly pushes familiar buttons.
  6. My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes
    The director, Oren Jacoby, who made the Oscar-nominated short “Sister Rose’s Passion” and the feature “Constantine’s Sword,” doesn’t give My Italian Secret much structural or chronological organization. The anecdotal presentation sometimes seems more suited for museum browsing than for viewing in a theater.
  7. The Riot Club
    Lone Scherfig (“An Education”), the Danish filmmaker who directed the movie from a screenplay by Ms. Wade, has coaxed wonderfully nasty performances from a young cast.
  8. Marfa Girl
    The scandal of Mr. Clark’s more recent movies, including “Wassup Rockers” and “Ken Park” and this new one, resides more in its tedium and lack of insight than its strenuously provocative content.
  9. Cupcakes
    This candy-coated confection is so irresistible that you’re captivated by its sentiment even as you acknowledge its manipulations.
  10. Nightlight
    A spare trifle carried largely by its leading actress.
  11. Man from Reno
    Man From Reno fascinates. It invites you to go back, decipher its clues and discern a grand design, if there is one.
  12. Serena
    The actors don’t just look uncomfortable in their period duds, they also look uneasy in their own skins, which is a feat for two such natural, physically confident screen performers.
  13. A Wolf at the Door
    As a piece of storytelling, A Wolf at the Door may be a tawdry little shocker. But on a visceral level, it is a knife to the gut.
  14. White God
    In classic narrative fashion, Mr. Mundruczo works the setup like a burlesque fan dancer, teasing out the reveal bit by bit.
  15. While We're Young
    This film, Mr. Baumbach’s movie, mostly brings a light touch and a forgiving gloss to its own self-consciousness. It is not afraid to be implicated in the confusion — in the self-involvement, the anxiety, the pettiness — it depicts. But there are also areas where it feels soft and compromised, where the subtlety and clarity of Mr. Baumbach’s vision seem to desert him.
  16. The Barber
    Scott Glenn handles the balancing act required of him in “The Barber” with his usual skill... The film, though, delivers its plot twists muddily and doesn’t really distinguish itself from the countless other creepy-killer tales out there.
  17. 52 Tuesdays
    A frustratingly fragmented yet warmly intimate portrait of an evolving bond that frays but doesn’t sever.
  18. Home
    A charming concoction with positive messages for younger children about conquering fears, understanding outsiders and knowing yourself.
  19. Get Hard
    The highest praise I can give Get Hard is that it is not quite as awful as it could have been.
  20. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
    A divertingly eccentric, often comically absurd movie.
  21. Please Be Normal
    A tiny, piercing study of dawning desperation that’s all the more remarkable for being virtually silent.
  22. Growing Up and Other Lies
    Mr. Jacobs and Mr. Grodsky have an extraordinary ear for the rhythms and nuances of everyday speech, as voices overlap, conversations take random directions, and casual remarks carry loaded subtexts.
  23. La Sapienza
    The movie is an unapologetically rarefied undertaking and at the same time a gracious and inviting film. And it embodies an elegant and melancholy paradox: What looks like tourism is really the pursuit of truth and beauty, and vice versa.
  24. She's Lost Control
    She’s Lost Control sustains a mood of deepening alienation, but the attitude of the movie is too detached for it to be emotionally gripping, and its ending is botched.
  25. Lost and Love
    Lost and Love (“Lost Orphan” in the original Chinese title) confronts serious problems but is too busy reaching for epic sweep and soaring moments to nail the fine detail of main characters’ fraught give-and-take.
  26. Metalhead
    It taps into something universal, and very precious, about loss, art and adolescent rebellion.
  27. Spring
    The actors get a chance to create a real relationship, and they make the most of the opportunity.
  28. Secret of Water
    There’s a whole lot of hogwash in Secret of Water, a cheesy documentary stuffed full of pseudoscience masquerading as profound truth.
  29. Can't Stand Losing You: Surviving the Police
    A movie singularly lacking in rock-doc unpredictability and verve.
  30. Zombeavers
    An intermittently diverting stew of low-budget effects and potty-mouth humor.
  31. Danny Collins
    What authenticity Mr. Cannavale and Ms. Bening bring to their roles is the sense of groundedness and integrity for one-note characters in a movie whose screenplay is little more than an efficiently executed outline.
  32. Tracers
    Corny twists and exchanges ensue in the wobbly story, but, delightfully, Daniel Benmayor’s film shows love not just for stunts but for the dynamic surfaces of the city.
  33. The Divergent Series: Insurgent
    Tighter, tougher and every bit as witless as its predecessor, The Divergent Series: Insurgent — the second segment in the cycle — arrives with a yawn and ends with a bang.
  34. Backcountry
    Mr. MacDonald’s ability to notch up dread moment by moment — with a rustle of leaves, the snap of a twig — is all the more impressive given that it takes a while to warm up to the two souls he cuts loose in those woods.
  35. Jauja
    The rounded-off corners of the almost-square frames evoke early movies and antique photographs, and there is wit and mischief in the way Mr. Alonso plays with the relationship between what we see, what we don’t see and what we expect to see.
  36. The Gunman
    It’s not a hard and fast rule, but in general when the main character, sometime in the third act, says, “I did some bad things ... ” and stares off into the middle distance, the implied end of the sentence is “including this movie.”
  37. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    A delicate, haunting study of a woman who has in several senses lost her way.
  38. Amour Fou
    it can be a strategically off-putting movie yet one that also steals under your skin scene by scene and through Ms. Schnoeink’s slowly revealing performance as an ill-fated heroine turned future biographical footnote.
  39. The Lovers
    [An] inert, exasperatingly proportioned phantasmagoria from Roland Joffé.
  40. Like Sunday, Like Rain
    Ms. Meester and Mr. Shatkin mesh beautifully, so much so that you might feel a little cheated at the end.
  41. Walter
    In touching lightly on themes without committing to any of them, the movie falls flat. What should be sweet is saccharine, what might be profound seems trite.
  42. The Wrecking Crew
    Mostly, it’s hagiography, with stars like Cher and Brian Wilson used as character witnesses to the players’ greatness.
  43. Home Sweet Hell
    While the oafish men come off poorly, the treatment of women as nothing more than schemers and monstrous Martha Stewart clones seems woefully past its expiration date.
  44. Eva
    The story has several well-disguised twists, and although it’s a drama, it is sprinkled with touches of whimsy, thanks to a colorful collection of robots.
  45. The Cobbler
    The sophomoric humor may be absent, but in its place is only a soufflé of whimsy, seasoned with soot, that fails to rise.
  46. Champs
    Now and then this documentary by Bert Marcus rises above mere promotion, leaving you wishing it had tackled the sport’s difficult questions in more depth.
  47. Cymbeline
    Cymbeline has been branded a tragedy, a tragicomedy and a romance, and Mr. Almereyda embraces all three categories. The movie is by turns grim, grimly amusing and romantic, sometimes at once.
  48. 3 Hearts
    The screenplay relies on so many mechanical contrivances to make the story gripping that you can hear the rusty machinery clanking.
  49. Run All Night
    The movie, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who directed Mr. Neeson in the efficient airborne thriller “Non-Stop,” has two saving graces: a tight script and terrific acting.
  50. Cinderella
    Mr. Branagh’s ascension into big-budget studio directing largely remains a mystery, and there’s little in Cinderella beyond its faces and gowns that captures the eye or the imagination.
  51. Seymour: An Introduction
    So effective does it close the distance between you and Mr. Bernstein that afterward you may find yourself scanning the streets, hoping to catch sight of him, as if for an old friend.
  52. It Follows
    It Follows recycles familiar teenage horror tropes — a girl alone in a house, evil forces banging on a door — but its mood is dreamy. Seldom do you feel manipulated by exploitative formulas. The violence, when it comes, is sudden, and the camera doesn’t linger over the gore.
  53. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
    Mr. Gibney, who enters swinging and keeps on swinging, comes across as less interested in understanding Scientology than in exposing its secrets, which makes for a lively and watchable documentary if not an especially enlightening one.
  54. Of Horses and Men
    Mr. Erlingsson’s upbeat outlook suggests that generations of horses and men have coexisted and will continue to do so for centuries more.
  55. Allure
    These drifting, unresolved stories may lack dramatic punch, but Mr. Nikolic, who teaches film at the New School, draws lovely performances from his cosmopolitan cast and oodles of atmosphere from a spare piano-and-strings soundtrack.
  56. Earth's Golden Playground
    Mr. Horvath’s procedural, increasingly dry documentary takes the “rush” out of “gold rush.”
  57. Deli Man
    This documentary goes heavy on the schmaltz, in all senses.
  58. The Mafia Only Kills in Summer
    The swings from goofy to gory and jokey to tragic cancel one another out, and Mr. Diliberto’s near-constant voice-over is irksome. As is the pivotal romance.
  59. These Final Hours
    The lesson may not be particularly original, but the film has some striking moments as it follows him to his destiny.
  60. Road Hard
    Mr. Carolla’s wide-ranging résumé includes writing, voice-over work, talk-show appearances and a popular podcast, but it’s light on acting, and he shows why here, proving himself unable to perform the difficult trick of making a loathsome character sympathetic.
  61. The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest
    The indomitable personality and talents of the serial prison escapee Mark DeFriest outshine the weaknesses of this documentary that bears his name.
  62. An Honest Liar
    Directors Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom have produced a jaunty, jovial portrait with a surprising sting in its tail.
  63. Two Men in Town
    The desert landscapes are gorgeously shot by Yves Cape, but Two Men in Town never seems to fully inhabit its setting. Nor does the schematic, occasionally clumsy story do justice to the skills of the cast.
  64. Unfinished Business
    A “EuroTrip” with balance sheets, the slick, innocuous comedy Unfinished Business fails to seal the deal.
  65. October Gale
    Ms. Clarkson and Mr. Speedman do what they can with their underwritten and overly contrived roles... Late in the game, Tim Roth boats in as Tom, a local with a grudge, and shocks the movie to life by throwing some lightning bolts of his own.
  66. Kidnapping Mr. Heineken
    Mr. Hopkins doesn’t have much to do, but it can be amusing to see him upstage everyone else with sonorous murmurings and imperious demands for a robe and Chinese takeout.
  67. Faults
    While Faults glances at the narcissism of cult leaders, its most penetrating investigation is into the root emptiness within disciples, the desperate hunger to relinquish personal initiative.
  68. Buzzard
    With its casual deadpan attitude, Buzzard offers a nightmare portrait of arrested development and anomie for the age of inequality.
  69. Chappie
    Even at his shakiest, Mr. Blomkamp holds your attention with stories about characters banding together to emerge from a hell not of their own making, a liberation journey that just isn’t the same old, same old when a director was born in South Africa.
  70. 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.
  71. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    In aggressively sunny picker-uppers like the Marigold movies, there is a thin line between adorable and insufferable. And in the second “Marigold,” Mr. Patel has succumbed to his tendency toward cuteness.
  72. The Lesson
    The plot undermines the film’s power. At the end you may be impressed at the skill on display, but you may also wish that you were more fully moved by the spectacle of a soul laid bare and transformed.
  73. Around The World In 50 Concerts
    If the movie gets a bit gooey at times that’s probably an occupational hazard when considering the sublime. And Ms. Honigmann’s restraint — there’s something classical in her style, too — keeps the film from floating away. When it threatens to, something piercing or traumatic brings it back to earth, where any account of art belongs.
  74. Focus
    The preposterousness of the story doesn’t seem like a rip-off, since the twists in the plot, for the most part, pay off nicely.
  75. Eastern Boys
    Explores interlocking themes of sexuality, immigration and power dynamics with a cleareyed sensitivity and refuses to demonize even its shadiest characters.
  76. Young Bodies Heal Quickly
    Some of the deadpan moments and more fraught exchanges don’t really come off. But all in all, it’s one curious, and furious, escapade.
  77. Futuro Beach
    Balancing its abstract storytelling with commanding visuals (by the gifted cinematographer Ali Olcay Gözkaya), Futuro Beach explores liberation and reinvention, the tug of familiarity versus the allure of the foreign.
  78. Out of the Dark
    Ornamenting its flimsy back story with assaultive sound effects and asinine behavior, Out of the Dark strains to shock.
  79. Bluebird
    On one level, Bluebird is a bitter slice of life about hardy, stoic New Englanders battling the elements and a crumbling regional economy. On another, it’s a poetic meditation on the human struggle to make sense of a cruel and indifferent universe.
  80. The Widowmaker
    The Widowmaker is commendable in that although it is a work of advocacy, it gives an array of opinions.
  81. The Salvation
    This is, it’s worth remembering, a movie set in the American West that was shot in South Africa by a Danish director with a Danish star. In other words it’s another dream of America, feverish, lovely and absurd.
  82. '71
    Mr. Demange makes his feature directing debut with ’71, but he already knows how to move bodies through space and the complex choreography that he’s worked out in this movie is a thing of joy.
  83. Maps to the Stars
    It takes a perverse effort of will to love “Maps to the Stars.” It’s a little too chilly, and in some places too easy. But you may find yourself drawn back to it, and retracing its route from the familiar to the uncanny, from entertainment to revulsion, from dream to nightmare.
  84. The Lazarus Effect
    Despite eclectic casting and occasional experiments with objective camera, the director, David Gelb (“Jiro Dreams of Sushi”), can’t breathe similar life into this risible mix of pseudoscientific hokum and supernatural freakouts.
  85. 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.
  86. Farewell to Hollywood
    Farewell to Hollywood is moving yet queasily unsettling, even if Ms. Nicholson’s enthusiasm mitigates the veneer of exploitation. Watching it feels like judging a last will and testament. The movie is an intimate dialogue from which viewers may prefer to recuse themselves.
  87. Wild Canaries
    Mr. Levine spins a caper that wins you over more through tenacity than through originality.
  88. Kung Fu Elliot
    Watching Elliot and his fellows stumble determinedly through shoots, pleasantly delusional about the movie’s prospects, is mildly amusing, a testament to indie film’s appeal for a certain hardy strain of dreamer. But the joke sours, and the documentary, filmed over two years, turns darker.
  89. The DUFF
    Even in this would-be subversive comedy. Success means getting the guy. Getting good grades (as Bianca does) is not enough, nor is writing the front-page article in the school paper.
  90. Wild Tales
    Mr. Szifron creates inhabited worlds with comic timing and visual flair, but you can hear him chortling as he shovels his people into the grinder.
  91. Approaching the Elephant
    Ms. Wilder, in her debut feature, riskily opts to leave much of the children’s educational activity fairly vague. Which gives it one more thing in common with school: You need to pay attention.
  92. All the Wilderness
    Mr. Johnson doesn’t give fateful weight to the breadcrumbs that guide James forward. Glancing encounters and faltering conversations unfold lightly and with a visual seductiveness that the cinematographer, Adam Newport-Berra, crescendos in the film’s drifting, transformative middle section.
  93. McFarland USA
    Aims to be rousing rather than revelatory, and it mostly succeeds.
  94. Hot Tub Time Machine 2
    Whether something did or didn’t happen, and the comic confusion as the future bumps into the past: those are the smart parts of a movie that is not as idiotic as it pretends to be.
  95. Queen and Country
    Queen and Country doesn’t quite have the bittersweet intensity of its precursor. The terrible magic of the war is missing, and so is the heightened, wide-eyed perceptiveness of the child protagonist.
  96. Coast of Death
    The director’s wide frame encompasses vast terrain from a middle vantage point, achieving views and noticing changes over time that a mere passer-by might not.
  97. Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
    Ambulant corpses may be tramping all over our movie and television screens these days, but Wyrmwood has enough novelty — and more than enough energy — to best its minuscule budget.
  98. Hits
    The gloriously scabrous ending to it all leaves the viewer wishing this talented writer had let it rip earlier.
  99. 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.
  100. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    With her dramatically pale face framed by a voluptuous dark cloud of hair, Ms. Elkabetz is never more effective than when she’s holding still, her face so drained of emotion that it transforms into a screen within the screen on which another, indelibly private movie is playing.
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