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. White Rabbit
    While White Rabbit is not a lost cause, its difficult story of mistreatment and lashing out proves too much of a challenge to tell well.
  2. What We Do in the Shadows
    This weird and witty spoof filters the routines of the living through the lens of the long dead.
  3. The Rewrite
    That Mr. Grant can bring Keith back from the edge more or less persuasively is a testament to his ability to convey genuine humility without mawkishness, once he sees the light.
  4. Kingsman: The Secret Service
    The problem is that Mr. Vaughn has no interest in, or perhaps understanding of, violence as a cinematic tool. He doesn’t use violence; he squanders it.
  5. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    It’s not especially horrifying, or even very thought-provoking. It is touching, however, because it represents one frequently misunderstood, intermittently great filmmaker’s tribute to another.
  6. Fifty Shades of Grey
    Fifty Shades of Grey might not be a good movie — O.K., it’s a terrible movie — but it might nonetheless be a movie that feels good to see, whether you squirm or giggle or roll your eyes or just sit still and take your punishment.
  7. Boy Meets Girl
    Placing sex and gender identity at the center of almost every conversation, the writer and director, Eric Schaeffer, is so keen to demythologize that the film’s potentially most affecting moments are too often smothered by the hackneyed characters and setups that surround them.
  8. The Other Man: F.W. de Klerk and the End of Apartheid
    None of this is particularly cinematic (he relies much too heavily on title cards to fill in historical blanks), but it is engaging, mainly because the stakes were so high and the statesmanship so delicate.
  9. Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine
    In lingering over moody night streets and trembling faces, Ms. Josue has brought this film to the verge of becoming a tear-jerker. But, as epitomized in an extraordinary scene with a conflicted priest, it’s all part of a shared soul-searching that still continues.
  10. 1971
    Ms. Hamilton’s straightforward documentary skillfully interweaves reminiscences by members of the group with re-enactments of the burglary.
  11. Love, Rosie
    Whether the material is “Much Ado About Nothing” or “When Harry Met Sally,” if your story requires keeping true loves apart, it is often polite to pass the time with a steady flow of comedy.
  12. Outcast
    The barnacle-encrusted plot...is dumbed down to the studs.
  13. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
    The new film displays enough nutty writing and sheer brio to confirm the stamina of its enduring and skillfully voiced characters.
  14. Seventh Son
    If nothing else, it’s amusing to imagine what [Mr. Bridges] and Ms. Moore chatted about between takes and how each managed to keep from cracking up, more or less.
  15. Jupiter Ascending
    With its nods to the original “Star Trek” and David Lynch’s proto-steampunk hallucination “Dune,” it seduces the eye with filigreed flourishes even as the mind reels from some of the mildewy storytelling.
  16. Call for Help
    If the point of Call for Help is to glorify a handful of off-the-grid heroes, it fails. If the point is to follow some young people who took their aimless wanderlust to a trouble spot and perhaps created more problems than they solved, it succeeds.
  17. On the Way to School
    On the Way to School never wavers in its bland uplift.
  18. Enter the Dangerous Mind
    Partly thanks to Ms. Reed — as well as to Scott Bakula, as Wendy’s beleaguered boss, and minor players — the movie has its share of underplayed little scenes of realistic color.
  19. Ballet 422
    Ballet 422 elegantly conveys the complex collaborations behind even a relatively modest production, and the toil and discipline that somehow deliver, for the patrons on opening night, a seamless spectacle of grace.
  20. Mad As Hell
    It’s a job requirement for a show host like Mr. Uygur to project his personality and beliefs; this filmmaker doesn’t muster a healthy skepticism to match.
  21. The Voices
    Grisly but not especially suspenseful, tongue-in-cheek without any real wit, The Voices aims to hit the intersection of horror and comedy but tumbles into an uncanny valley of tedious creepiness.
  22. Lovesick
    This soulless, sterile romantic comedy has slipped under the wire to give audiences a headache and Matt LeBlanc’s reputation a relapse.
  23. Hawaizaada
    Mr. Puri works hard, but the strain shows and so do the movie’s seams. And Mr. Khurrana, who rides the line between ingratiating and annoying, has trouble carrying the movie.
  24. Above and Beyond
    These fond recollections of derring-do hail from a different era, and the movie’s one-sided view of history is bound to start arguments. The film is best appreciated as a straightforward testimonial: old war buddies’ hurrah against anti-Semitism.
  25. Supremacy
    Feeding over-the-top language to underdeveloped characters, Deon Taylor’s Supremacy dramatizes racism with an unvarying intensity that quickly becomes wearing.
  26. Wild Card
    Slow-motion knockouts follow, with Mr. Statham as sure-fisted as ever, but the “Expendables” director Simon West can only summon dead air in between. Mr. Goldman’s slightly offbeat underworld is not very convincing, and Mr. Statham’s thick voice and inexpressive acting suggest brain fog rather than gritty blues.
  27. Hard to Be a God
    Mr. German was just as stubborn in sticking to his personal vision (and revisions) as he was innovative in his storytelling, and he’s left behind a final opus that is hard to shake.
  28. The Devil's Violinist
    A shallow commentary on how an artist’s talent can be subsumed by the desire for fame and fortune. Or maybe just by the need to make a movie.
  29. Backstreet Boys: Show 'Em What You're Made Of
    It is insight-free and cliché-heavy, with the five sharing obvious reminiscences about the thrill of superstardom, visiting haunts from their youth, shooting baskets and occasionally rehearsing.
  30. Amira & Sam
    Written and directed by Sean Mullin, a comedian and onetime Army officer (he plays a comic in the film), Amira & Sam is more successful as a portrait of veteran alienation than as a romance.
  31. Alien Outpost
    The writing is so poor and the visual embellishments so few that some of the violence, like the frequent attacks on the base by local villagers, make little sense.
  32. Project Almanac
    The wish fulfillment of time travel tends to be fun to watch, and the director, Dean Israelite, feeds on the friends’ giddy escapades for a while.
  33. Girlhood
    Even as she stops at familiar stations on the road to maturity — problems at home and school, new friendships and first love — Ms. Sciamma revels in the risky, reckless exuberance of adolescence and in the sheer joy of filming it.
  34. Black or White
    Mike Binder’s steady, well-intentioned exploration of the racial tensions affecting two branches of a Southern California family, is notable for what it doesn’t try to do.
  35. My Name Is Hmmm...
    My Name Is Hmmm ... has its magical moments, but they are sabotaged by the director’s showy, ham-handed technique applied to a frustratingly threadbare screenplay that leaves you wanting more.
  36. Timbuktu
    Timbuktu is an act of resistance and revenge because it asserts the power of secularism not as an ideology but rather as a stubborn fact of life.
  37. Miss Hill: Making Dance Matter
    The director, Greg Vander Veer, makes this case through the sheer number of people he interviews.
  38. We'll Never Have Paris
    This derivative comedy, in addition to not being particularly funny, gives off a sense of telling us more than we needed to know.
  39. Americons
    Mr. Avgerinos’s glossy, overripe take on high-flying, unscrupulous lenders — the wolves of Main Street — deteriorates into a hot mess of montages, trailer-ready one-liners and thudding drama.
  40. Song One
    Heartfelt but enervated, Song One noodles around the Brooklyn music scene without stirring up magic.
  41. Salvation Army
    For a film rooted in a personal story, Salvation Army feels awfully remote.
  42. Against the Sun
    Against the Sun is a groaningly tedious survival story that will at least leave you with a renewed commitment to wearing sunscreen.
  43. Killers
    At heart a repulsive slash-and-bash with philosophical pretensions, Killers is classed up considerably by strong acting, a multi-strand plot and a tone that’s both nihilistic and mournful.
  44. The Humbling
    The movie is too shrewd to qualify as a jeremiad, but underneath the comedy are boiling undercurrents of anger and despair.
  45. Cake
    It’s the sort of well-intentioned independent effort that can make criticism feel like overkill. There’s nothing to hate, nothing to love. The movie’s greatest virtue is that it gives Ms. Aniston a little room to play against the somewhat sardonic tough-cookie type that she deploys in vulgar comedies.
  46. Son of a Gun
    Son of a Gun adds to the mystique that Australian crime films are meaner, nastier and more brutish than their American counterparts. But it changes style roughly every half-hour. And behind its macho preening is a preposterous, routinely executed story.
  47. R100
    Mr. Matsumoto, as if realizing that viewers might need to wake up, stuffs a ball gag in a child’s mouth and throws in some reflexive nonsense involving an old director and some critics who seem to be watching the same movie you are. They think it’s terrible and finally it’s hard to disagree.
  48. Strange Magic
    At once disarming and calculated, Strange Magic is a film of commodified feelings, evoking memories of other experiences — whether of Shakespeare, the original songs or authentic enchantment.
  49. The Boy Next Door
    Mr. Cohen, no stranger to delivering pulp product, employs visual clichés as if they were flash cards; no exposed thigh or made-you-jump reveal goes unexploited.
  50. Mortdecai
    What a frantically dull spectacle this vanity project is.
  51. Manny
    The narrative has been fashioned mostly in Mr. Pacquiao’s favor, although there are mentions of overwork, infidelity and gambling. Banal, stentorian narration by Liam Neeson (“Once victory is stolen from you, what are you left with?”) mostly gives the sense that it’s the viewer being carried around the ring.
  52. Black Sea
    The story loses credibility as it goes along, as the body count escalates, and Robinson’s solutions to life-and-death crises grow increasingly far-fetched.
  53. The Duke of Burgundy
    In the end there is nothing especially campy about “The Duke of Burgundy,” which neither mocks its heroines nor the breathless, naughty screen tradition to which they belong. It’s a love story, and also a perversely sincere (and sincerely perverse) labor of love.
  54. Mommy
    To take Mommy as an undisciplined outpouring of aggression and angst is to underestimate its artistry. [Mr. Dolan] has both advanced beyond the romanticism of “Heartbeats” and “Laurence Anyways” and regressed toward a more primal and confrontational mode of storytelling. Mommy may seem out of control, but it knows exactly what it’s doing.
  55. Mille soleils (A Thousand Suns)
    Heartbreaking and thought-provoking, Mille Soleils traces connections between Senegal’s past and present, and reflects on a cinematic legacy that remains insufficiently appreciated, in the West and perhaps also in Africa.
  56. The Guitar Mongoloid
    Mr. Ostlund’s 2004 debut, begins as a free-floating portrait of mischief and compulsion — a cousin to Harmony Korine’s “Gummo” that comments obliquely on fascism and violence.
  57. Play
    It is provocative simply in showing how trust is gained and kept, even after the swindled kids have understood their robbers’ motives.
  58. Involuntary
    The bitterly funny, multistrand Involuntary, from 2008, is a step forward in the director’s ambition.
  59. 20 Once Again
    Mining deeper emotions from the fanciful premise doesn’t work out for the film, which gets tied down to a generic musical-contest subplot. It’s a workable comedy that’s sunk by its attempts to impersonate something else too.
  60. Vice
    Evidencing more bullets than brains, Vice — a bit of ephemeral science-fiction twaddle directed by Brian A. Miller — has absolutely nothing to recommend it.
  61. Still Life
    As the pace picks up, whatever spell the movie cast is shattered, and Still Life melts into a heap of sentimental slush.
  62. Spare Parts
    The movie’s setup has underdog appeal in spades. But it’s all for naught in a screenplay, by Elissa Matsueda (working from Joshua Davis’s 2005 article in Wired magazine), that plays down intellect in favor of corn and cliché.
  63. Northern Borders
    Mr. Dern is fine in his crotchety-old-man mode, but the rest of the acting is labored, and the story is an unfocused mishmash.
  64. Medeas
    Capturing the poetry of bodies at rest and a landscape frozen in time (filming was done primarily in the Santa Clarita area of California), Chayse Irvin’s exquisite 35-millimeter photography is dreamy and sometimes devastating.
  65. Loitering with Intent
    The movie has no apparent destination in mind; it ends with a complacent shrug having barely reached feature running time. Ms. Tomei, Mr. Rockwell and Mr. Geraghty get stray laughs, but “Loitering With Intent” mostly plays like an excuse for its makers to hang out.
  66. The Wedding Ringer
    Mr. Hart tells wild tales, Mr. Gad is humiliated, and most everyone else gets to dish out or receive abuse. But the laughs are not a sure thing.
  67. Life Inside Out
    This low-key drama so insistently resists epiphanies that it verges on bland.
  68. Joy of Man's Desiring
    As with his other features, brevity — in this case, 1 hour 10 minutes — has a way of making the film seem minor. It’s a little diffuse, but it suggests that Mr. Côté is trying out a sketch, with more experiments to come.
  69. Gangs of Wasseypur
    Although the narrative contains echoes of “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” — and perhaps “Casino,” in that much of it is structured as a flashback from an assassination attempt — “Gangs” lacks the poetry and character interest of those films.
  70. Appropriate Behavior
    For all its disorganization and lack of an ending or even a sense of direction, Appropriate Behavior is alive. The screenplay is packed with smart remarks, clever and unpredictable turns of phrase that knock you off balance.
  71. Little Accidents
    The net effect of the messy bedroom sheets, the marital squabbling and lachrymose, emotional bloodletting is to turn a tragedy into an atmospheric backdrop for three isolated souls, all of whom might have started out considerably less lonely if the movie had a firmer grasp on the world in which they live.
  72. Paddington
    In stark contrast to their furry, blundering star, the makers of Paddington have colored so carefully inside the lines that any possibility of surprise or subversion is effectively throttled.
  73. Blackhat
    Michael Mann’s thriller Blackhat, a story about the intersection of bodies and machines, is a spectacular work of unhinged moviemaking. By turns brutal and sentimental, lovely and lurid, as serious as the grave and blissfully preposterous, it combines a truckload of plot with many of the obsessions, tropes, sights and sounds that distinguish his other movies.
  74. Giuseppe Makes a Movie
    Despite the poverty of his collaborators, Mr. Andrews, who seems to live on sardines and rice, doesn’t feel like an exploiter. He calls his friends “beautiful eccentrics,” which aptly describes him, too.
  75. I
    I is exuberant and unselfconscious but too cartoonish to engage your emotions. The onslaught of images and music will engage your senses, though, even as you’re left giggling at the too-muchness of it all.
  76. Match
    The movie pulls the rug out from under the audience several times, but in the end there is not much underneath.
  77. Human Capital
    It’s all handsomely managed, polished and professional, but the pieces are too neatly manufactured to feel as if anything is truly at stake.
  78. Vessel
    Vessel becomes a film not just about abortion but also about activism. It raises provocative questions about the power of laws to police information in an increasingly globalized world.
  79. Taken 3
    Mr. Megaton’s direction of action sequences borders on atrocious. Ragged camerawork and editing ruin freeway car chases and hand-to-hand combat alike.
  80. Farewell, Herr Schwarz
    Yael Reuveny’s Farewell Herr Schwarz traces a Holocaust mystery with stumbling curiosity and endearing sincerity.
  81. It's All So Quiet
    Ms. Leopold’s previous film, “Brownian Movement,” was a stringent, even off-putting study of a delicate-looking doctor who has secret trysts with various men, and her latest feature feels gentler, shot digitally and suffused with the gray shadows of old houses and dim twilights. But it’s just as concerned with the immediacy of desire.
  82. Ode to My Father
    Little more than an archipelago of historical set pieces linked by a syrupy causeway of sentiment, JK Youn’s Ode to My Father may have slain them in South Korea, but its packaged pain and bullet-point structure are likely to leave Western audiences cold.
  83. La Última Película
    The movie revels in multiple film stocks (with hairs or threads often on the camera lens) and self-conscious “Last Movie” flourishes (long intervals between credits, “scene missing” title cards, a version of “Me and Bobby McGee”) while maintaining its blithe humor.
  84. Valley of Saints
    Valley of Saints finds a poignant humanity in this chaste romance, which awakens in Gulzar a wondrous sense of possibility, along with a new awareness of the world’s complexity.
  85. Something, Anything
    Examining a more generalized discontent through the lens of one woman’s pain, the writer and director, Paul Harrill, concentrates instead on the ordinary details that constitute a life and the way small choices nudge us toward larger ones.
  86. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
    [A] dryly funny, enigmatic new work.
  87. Preservation
    Like his ill-fated hunting party, Mr. Denham’s plans for his thriller don’t turn out quite the way he’d hoped.
  88. The World Made Straight
    The finale, in which blood rivalries are redressed in an absurdly literal manner, fatally strains credulity.
  89. Black November
    There’s a go-for-broke vigor to the way Mr. Amata cuts to the conflict in most scenes, but the heavy-handedness across the board imposes some significant limitations. Mr. Amata, though, pulls no punches with his ending.
  90. Dark Summer
    Despite Mr. Stormare’s valiant efforts, “Dark Summer” (directed by Paul Solet) feels listlessly plotted and insipidly performed.
  91. Predestination
    Mr. Hawke serves as both the narrator and the story’s ballast amid all the woo-woo interludes and disruptions, the puzzle piece you hold and worry about even as the scenery changes and identities shift.
  92. Beloved Sisters
    With its dearth of substance and its wandering focus, this is a middlebrow bodice-ripper posing as an epic that hasn’t the foggiest idea of what it wants to say.
  93. The Taking of Tiger Mountain
    The movie has a nationalistic, didactic flavor and a tiresome devotion to spectacle. Even the climax is staged two ways.
  94. Li'l Quinquin
    The physical beauty of Li’l Quinquin tells me that beneath what could be interpreted as contemptuous misanthropy is a bedrock of stern compassion.
  95. The Search for General Tso
    Mr. Cheney’s movie, while teasing at times, does its celebrating and debunking in mild-mannered fashion, making points without seeming to try to score them.
  96. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    The director, Tom Harper, seems less interested in allegory than in monotonous, conventional goosing, the kind that involves flickering lights and a creaky rocking chair.
  97. A Most Violent Year
    J. C. Chandor, the writer and director of this pulpy, meaty, altogether terrific new film, and Bradford Young, its supremely talented director of photography, succeed in giving this beat-up version of the city both historical credibility and expressive power.
  98. PK
    Mr. Hirani remains an excellent storyteller, weaving his disparate story strands into a convincing, satisfying whole — a rare Bollywood feat.
  99. Barbecue
    Mr. Wilson’s Antoine is too much of a pill to root for, and the voice-over and wispy songs dribbling over scenes only underline the forgettable filmmaking.
  100. The Interview
    The Interview is pretty much what everyone thought it would be before all the trouble started: a goofy, strenuously naughty, hit-and-miss farce, propelled not by any particular political ideas but by the usual spectacle of male sexual, emotional and existential confusion.
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