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. When We Leave
    It is frequently gripping and sincere in its intentions, but never quite as revelatory, or as devastating, as it should be.
  2. The Toxic Avenger
    The outrageous violence, a core allure of the original, remains, but the gross-out is situated in a more colorfully pulpy universe and has a more smartly self-conscious touch to its comedy.
  3. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
    There are no signs of waning energy here, not even in an Enterprise crew that looks ever more ready for intergalactic rocking chairs. The principals' enthusiasm for their material has never seemed to fade. If anything, that enthusiasm grows more appealingly nutty with time.
  4. In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis
    A repetitious feel begins to take over. For some viewers, quietude may yield to boredom.
  5. Voices in Wartime
    Rick King's stirring documentary Voices in Wartime is not, as you might guess from the title, a compilation of soldiers' battlefield letters to their families back home. This intense little film is about poetry, and not just Homer's "Iliad."
  6. Hope Springs
    The movie is an awkward cross between a domestic comedy and a marital tragedy that's laced with laughs, soggy with tears and burdened by a booming, blunt soundtrack that amplifies every narrative beat.
  7. Radical Wolfe
    Richard Dewey’s staid, by-the-book documentary can hardly match the flair with which Wolfe lived and wrote.
  8. Catfish
    When the going gets weird, Hunter S. Thompson used to say, the weird turn pro, but these filmmakers never transcend their own amateurism. They turn what could have been a brilliant exploration of the hidden corners of contemporary reality into an opportunity for gawking and condescension.
  9. I Am Legend
    There is something graceful and effortless about this performance (Mr. Smith's), which not only shows what it might feel like to be the last man on earth, but also demonstrates what it is to be a movie star.
  10. E-Dreams
    The movie is a little claustrophobic -- a marathon of conference calls, frenzied pointing and clicking, and office pep talks.
  11. The Legend of Leigh Bowery
    The film's most weirdly beautiful moments are its excerpts from Bowery's collaborations with the Michael Clark Dance Company.
  12. Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
    After Jimmy Neutron was over, I felt glassy-eyed and a little headachy. But the boy genius who accompanied me to the screening could not take his eyes off the screen. I think he's in his room right now, building a shrink ray to try out on his dad.
  13. Coffee and Cigarettes
    The implication that beauty and meaning can be found in odd places at unlikely, idle moments resonates through this lovely film.
  14. They Call Us Monsters
    They Call Us Monsters doesn’t shy from the consequences of the violence the prisoners were accused of (we meet a paralyzed victim of a shooting), even as it suggests that the system...proceeds almost mechanically.
  15. Distant Constellation
    Said to be intended as a reflection on shifts in Turkish history and identity, it is too diffuse and withholding to add up to a cogent result.
  16. The Missouri Breaks
    The film conveys a fine sense of place and period, of weather and mood and the precariousness of life, which are things that Mr. Nicholson responds to as an actor. Yet the plot, along with Mr. Brando, keeps intruding and throwing things out of balance.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Till the End of Time
    Only intermittently compelling as an entertainment, notwithstanding the freshness and urgency of its subject.
  18. BS High
    The tale is one of greed and grift. But BS High, a documentary about the saga, is too taken by the audacity of Roy Johnson, the founder of Bishop Sycamore, to critique his actions.
  19. Dario Argento Panico
    Part career profile and part psychological exploration, “Panico” smoothly accomplishes the first but teases gold with the second.
  20. Les Misérables
    However turbulent its narrative, this Les Miserables unfolds in a comforting style, serious and intelligent in ways that seem much too quaint today. The essence of Hugo's morality tale remains pure, and so does the value of a vigorous, gripping story, straightforwardly told.
  21. The Future of Food
    Quietly inflammatory film.
  22. The Wild Blue Yonder
    There is pleasure in such useless beauty, of course, and pleasure too in drifting with the jellyfish amid the wild blue yonder of a great filmmaker’s imagination.
  23. Miss Stevens
    Ms. Rabe’s beautifully balanced performance reminds you that people never really grow up.
  24. Basquiat
    But the film's central figure remains a cipher, the subject of a colorful scrapbook rather than a revealing portrait.
  25. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants
    All of its head-spinning action has a stultifying effect. At all times, the film seems afraid that it’ll lose its audience’s attention, barraging us with the mindlessly zany to hold our engagement.
  26. The Wedding Song
    A seductively fluid and tactile drama from the writer and director Karin Albou, explores love and identity through the prism of the female body and the rights of its owner.
  27. Prince
    At times tender and at others unflinchingly brutal, this small drama of innocence and temptation could have aimed much higher.
  28. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    Plots and subplots are handled with clumsy expediency, and themes that might connect this movie with the larger Lucasfilm mythos aren’t allowed to develop. You’re left wanting both more and less.
  29. Summer of 85
    It ultimately stumbles in this balancing act and loses sight of its emotional core, but its efforts remain compelling and delightfully bizarre.
  30. Widow Clicquot
    Ambitious as it is in scope, the film is also somewhat charmless and dour, caught between wanting to deliver the passion audiences expect from a period romance and constructing a suspenseful underdog tale. It’s too bad it never finds a winning balance.
  31. A United Kingdom
    While her filmmaking style can sometimes come across as staid, [Ms. Asante's] sense of pace is always acute. The best reason to see A United Kingdom, however, is the performance by Mr. Oyelowo.
  32. Tremors
    Tremors wants to be funny, but it spends too much time winking at the audience. More than anything else, it looks like the sort of movie that might have been put together so that tourists visiting Universal Studios could see a movie being made.
  33. The Accused
    A consistently engrossing melodrama, modest in its aims and as effective for the cliches it avoids as for the clear eye through which it sees its working-class American lives.
  34. A Good Woman Is Hard to Find
    While the movie barrels toward a final act that’s more feminist fantasy than credible conclusion, Bolger’s phenomenal performance locks us tightly on Sarah’s side.
  35. Last Night in Soho
    Nothing in Wright’s previous work quite prepared me for Last Night in Soho, its easy seductiveness and spikes of sophistication. Dissolving the border between present and past, fact and fantasy, the director (aided by the euphoric talents of the cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung) has produced some of the most dazzling imagery of his career.
  36. White Men Can't Jump
    The terrifically confident Mr. Snipes gives a funny, knowing performance with a lot of physical verve. And Mr. Harrelson (of Cheers) further perfects the art of appearing utterly without guile. Their comic timing together shapes the film's raucous wit, and their basketball playing looks creditable, too.
  37. The Lady in Question Is Charles Busch
    Living proof that hard work and dedication can lead to professional and private gratification through the best and worst of times, Mr. Busch stands as solid source material for a film and for general inspiration.
  38. Buried
    In the movie's cheapest, most exploitative gesture - just as it is about to run out of tricks - a snake slithers into the pine box in which Paul awakens bound and gagged, not knowing where he is. With that gimmick, the movie sacrifices its last shred of integrity.
  39. White Girl
    We’re all familiar with the term contact high, but not with its antithesis. Because it is so believable, White Girl is a contact bummer that’s hard to shake.
  40. Married Life
    This is the sort of gallows humor that Hitchcock relished drawing out in cruelly amusing cat-and-mouse games, not to be taken too seriously. The same is true of Married Life. The murder plot is not to be taken any more literally than the lethal games of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”
  41. The Love We Make
    Captured mostly in gorgeous black and white, The Love We Make is alternately trite, touching, funny and fascinating.
  42. Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation
    Evokes the flavor of the era just before the music business exploded into a mass-market juggernaut. The film's pleasures are the same ones offered by a sprawling, lavishly illustrated magazine spread.
  43. We Are Twisted F***ing Sister!
    The movie tells an incomplete version of the band’s story...but provides a comprehensive and sometimes harrowing portrayal of the grind a working bar band in the 1970s had to endure to get by.
  44. Carmen Jones
    There is nothing wrong with the music—except that it does not fit the people or the words. But that did not seem to make much difference to Mr. Hammerstein or Mr. Preminger. They were carried away by their precocity. The present consequence is a crazy mixed-up film.
  45. Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything
    By those standards, Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything is disappointing, and more of a puff piece than I suspect Walters herself would have wanted. Yet seen through a different lens, it’s also fascinating — a rather thrilling history of television journalism, as seen through Walters’s life.
  46. Camille Claudel 1915
    Ms. Binoche’s portrayal of Camille is one of the most wrenching performances she has given.
  47. The Royal Road
    Ms. Olson’s images are often captivating, but too often undercut by the aforementioned aspiring-to-the-dialectical voice-over, which is awkwardly written, and delivered with a lack of affect that grows tedious over the course of an hour.
  48. Bad Hurt
    Throughout, the filmmakers live up to the movie’s title. But as the story comes to a close, they opt to wrap it in comforting cliché, and they turn a miserable but credible viewing experience into a confounding one.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Informer
    Ford has made an astonishing screen drama out of Liam O'Flaherty's novel The Informer.
  50. Godspell
    I like its music, its drive and its determination, even when it's pretending to a kind of innocence and naiveté that I never for a second believe.
  51. The Harvey Girls
    It may be a rather lofty tribute to Fred Harvey's girls, but it's a show.
  52. Grace Is Gone
    Mr. Cusack demonstrates once again that he is Hollywood’s second-most-reliable nice guy, after Tom Hanks. Devoid of vanity, with no hidden agendas, he never strains to be likable. Good will, integrity and a native common sense ooze out of him.
  53. Spinning Plates
    This dully structured film makes its points early and often, treading water before a purposely delayed big finish.
  54. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
    The film's sobriety and carefully balanced arguments make it an exemplary piece of reporting, although its emotional heat rarely rises to a boil.
  55. Going in Style
    Going in Style, a first commercial feature written and directed by Martin Brest, means to be both moving and comic, but though the cast is headed by three fine actors, two of whom, Mr. Burns and Mr. Carney, are also extremely funny men, it never elicits any emotional response more profound than curiosity.
  56. Tigertail
    Spanning more than half a century, Tigertail goes back and forth in time, tracing the events that allowed Pin-Jui to achieve his American dream yet made him so aloof to his loved ones. It does this to mixed results.
  57. The War Wagon
    The Wayne-Douglas Western looks like something that the two saddle-sore stars cooked up to kill time and make a little money... It's not a bad picture, just obvious.
  58. The Seduction of Joe Tynan
    The principal thing that keeps "The Seduction of Joe Tynan" engrossing is the level of acting it sustains throughout.
  59. Black Dynamite
    As a five-minute clip on YouTube, this spoof might be a small masterpiece. As a feature film, it’s both too much and not nearly enough.
  60. Body Snatchers
    With its homogenized flavor, this Body Snatchers seems like a movie made BY pod people, FOR pod people.
  61. ...So Goes the Nation
    A clear-eyed and utterly ruthless dissection of the battle for Ohio in the months leading up to the 2004 presidential election.
  62. Philip Roth: Unmasked
    Fittingly enough, given that his great subject has always been himself, it is Mr. Roth who dominates the screen...He is, for 90 minutes, marvelous company — expansive, funny, generous and candid.
  63. Mine 9
    The goings-on are grim, grueling and, eventually, grisly. Mensore shoots them with a sharp eye for maintaining coherent spatial relations, which enhances the suspense. It’s a sometimes bracing simulation.
  64. Paddington In Peru
    It’s a somewhat rote exercise in soul-searching, and the script lacks subtlety. (At one point, a character actually says, “you have found yourself.”) But the experience is still a worthy one for our furry leading man.
  65. Staying Vertical
    Something about the strangeness of the people and the harsh indifference of the nature that surrounds them feels real, even if realism in the conventional sense may be the last thing on the filmmaker’s mind.
  66. Birth of the Living Dead
    Mr. Romero, manifesting a self-effacing demeanor and sensible humanity, is a most agreeable raconteur.
  67. Lemming
    The second half of the movie squanders suspense and momentum, solving its riddles by deflating them.
  68. Ismael's Ghosts
    As is customary in Mr. Desplechin’s work, there’s a lot of dialogue in Ismael’s Ghosts, but this movie’s nerve endings vibrate most avidly and tenderly in scenes where not a word is spoken.
  69. Stars at Noon
    The results are sometimes wobbly, but this much remains stable: No living director better understands the politics of sensuality, the terrible power of light and shadow on skin.
  70. Before the Fall
    If Before the Fall feels a tad overdetermined, it also feels emotionally honest. Calmly and carefully, Mr. Gansel makes large points with small scenes.
  71. Ouija: Origin of Evil
    The director, Mike Flanagan, who with Jeff Howard also wrote the script, demonstrates rare patience for horror fare as he builds toward the macabre.
  72. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    A brilliantly truthful film on a subject that is usually shrouded in wishful thinking, mythmongering and outright denial.
  73. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
    Dai Sijie's tender, touching adaptation of his own novel of the same title.
  74. Life, Above All
    A grave and quietly moving story about a South African girl of extraordinary character, does something that few painful dramas accomplish: It tells a tale of resilience without platitudes about the triumph of the human spirit or without false promises about an unclouded future.
  75. The End We Start From
    It’s as much a movie about the hazy struggles of early motherhood as it is about survival in a destroyed world — and it’s best when it leans into the former, with characters’ discussing why anyone has a baby at all.
  76. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
    Given that movies can now show us everything, the manifestations that Ms. Rowling described could be less magical only if they were delivered at a news conference.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Alone with Her
    In the end, the characters seem less archetypal than vague, and aside from its sophisticated presentation, Alone With Her doesn't differ all that much from its template: the late-’80s and early-’90s Fill-In-the-Blanks-From-Hell movies that followed in the wake of "Fatal Attraction," many of whose elements (including the heroine’s inquisitive, doomed best friend) Mr. Nicholas revives almost verbatim.
  78. The Slaughter Rule
    A bleak, lyrical meditation on the frontier spirit and American machismo and its torments.
  79. The Turandot Project
    The sheer scale of the production, and the size of the venue, make the film interesting to watch.
  80. Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
    Smoothly incorporates archival material, including scenes of Mr. Zinn's public appearances, interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Berrigan and Alice Walker (his student at Spelman). Matt Damon also reads well-chosen excerpts from Mr. Zinn's writing.
  81. Rain Man
    In much the way that Raymond stays detached, the performance seems to exist outside the film but, instead of illuminating Rain Man, it upstages the work of everyone else involved. [16 Dec 1988, p.C12]
    • The New York Times
  82. Closer
    Unlike most movie love stories, Closer does have the virtue of unpredictability. The problem is that, while parts are provocative and forceful, the film as a whole collapses into a welter of misplaced intensity.
  83. Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema After the 1979 Revolution
    An inspiring demonstration of that old saw about necessity being the mother of (in this case, artistic) invention.
  84. The Decomposition of the Soul
    This kind of glance at history is a poor substitute for a hard, steady and expansive examination.
  85. Mundo alas
    An admirable documentary about an unusual concert tour.
  86. Old Cats
    You understand the different ways the members of this extended family are trapped, in physical space and in psychological patterns they don’t fully understand. But you also realize that, like house cats that venture to the door to sniff at the air outside, they don’t necessarily want to be free.
  87. Dzi Croquettes
    If the film doesn't measure up as a piece of historical scholarship, it does manage to be a rather touching exploration of the troupe's life cycle: achieving notoriety, then being torn apart by fame, then being destroyed by forces beyond its control.
  88. Talaash
    It's very much a Hindi film, but updated and delivered with conviction and style.
  89. The Dirties
    Remarkable as much for its insights as for its audacity, The Dirties approaches school violence with a comic veneer that slowly shades into deep darkness.
  90. Charlie Victor Romeo
    It is a curious hybrid of documentary and experimental theater. It is also one of the most terrifying movies I have ever seen.
  91. Altina
    In Peter Sanders’s sassy documentary Altina... there’s plenty of interesting ground to cover.
  92. Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire in the 60s
    It’s both a credit to, and a shortcoming of, the movie that it suggests an illustrated bibliography. It makes you want to stop watching and, instead, read or reread all of the pieces mentioned.
  93. West
    West, for all its intensity, becomes too bogged down in detail to be as strong as it might have been.
  94. The Invisible Front
    This film, somewhat clumsy yet full of illuminating interviews, seems mostly like an exercise in building national pride, but it holds lessons for anyone trying to resist an overwhelming force.
  95. Drone
    There are no suggested solutions here to the difficult issues raised, but the film at least reminds us that it’s important not to accept this new way of warring without scrutinizing it.
  96. Ants on a Shrimp
    None of the concoctions left me salivating (a basic, I’d think, for any food porn), and the exercise seems silly if not decadent. But foodies with a refined palate might differ — de gustibus, after all — and other viewers can appreciate the manic creativity that drives Mr. Redzepi and his crew.
  97. Finding Babel
    In what probably qualifies as both an accomplishment and a shortcoming, the movie makes you want to read Babel’s writing instead.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, the Colours of Life
    In the end, “Water and Sugar” proves the best view of Di Palma is still the gaze from his own eyes.
  99. Revenge of the Pink Panther
    If you have the Clouzot habit, as I have, there's very little that Mr. Edwards and Mr. Sellers could do that would make you find the movie disappointing.
  100. Shampoo
    In Shampoo Ashby shows that he has a good memory for a couple of decades of cinematic clichés. He gives us an unnecessary motor race and some obligatory slow motion, but he misses most of the opportunities offered him.
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