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. Big Eyes
    Trying to do Margaret justice, Mr. Burton can’t prevent himself (and Mr. Waltz) from upstaging her.
  2. American Sniper
    Less a war movie than a western — the story of a lone gunslinger facing down his nemesis in a dusty, lawless place — it is blunt and effective, though also troubling.
  3. The Gambler
    Mr. Wyatt’s direction is smooth, although he’s more confident, and the movie more convincing, when he goes for baroque with the story’s excesses.
  4. Leviathan
    The director, Andrey Zvyagintsev, has a heavenly eye but a leaden hand, and his movie is as heavy as it is transporting, filled with stirring shots of the natural world and deep dives into a human realm flooded with tears and vodka.
  5. Into the Woods
    Into the Woods, the splendid Disney screen adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical, infuses new vitality into the tired marketing concept of entertainment for “children of all ages.” That usually translates to mean only children and their doting parents. But with Into the Woods, you grow up with the characters, young and old, in a lifelong process of self-discovery.
  6. Unbroken
    What the movie ends up in desperate need of is a sense of life made real and palpable through dreadful, transporting details, not a life embalmed in hagiographic awe.
  7. Selma
    Even if you think you know what’s coming, Selma hums with suspense and surprise. Packed with incident and overflowing with fascinating characters, it is a triumph of efficient, emphatic cinematic storytelling. And much more than that, of course.
  8. Two Days, One Night
    Her shoulders slumped, her eyes weary, her gait heavy, Ms. Cotillard moves past naturalism into something impossible to doubt and hard to describe. Sandra is an ordinary person in mundane circumstances, but her story, plainly and deliberately told, is suspenseful, sobering and, in the original, fear-of-God sense of the word, tremendous.
  9. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb
    It’s a chronically underachieving movie, but relatively amusing in its quaint wish fulfillment.
  10. Winter Sleep
    Mr. Ceylan performs this particular operation with rigorous solemnity, technical virtuosity and precision tools — his lapidary visual style rises to the challenge of the natural environment — yet there’s something missing from the very start, namely the spark of breathed-in life.
  11. Song of the Sea
    Song of the Sea moves delicately but purposefully from pain to contentment and from anger to love. On land and underwater, the siblings’ adventures unfold in hand-drawn, painterly frames of misty pastels, sometimes encircled by cobwebby borders that give them the look of pictures in a locket.
  12. A Small Section of the World
    It’s like a gently distressed company film blown up to feature length.
  13. Life of an Actress: The Musical
    Unfortunately, poor execution prevents the movie from achieving an authentic throwback feel. Although the principal cast members are Broadway veterans, here they struggle with technological and tonal issues.
  14. Inside the Mind of Leonardo
    The movie starts by noting Leonardo’s intent to leave a memory of himself in the minds of others. That’s a benchmark Inside the Mind of Leonardo won’t meet.
  15. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation
    Employing bursts of Bach and English-language narration, this lulling, informative documentary never fully grapples with its topic’s complexity.
  16. Annie
    The cast would have been better served by a middle school production overseen by a creatively frustrated, inappropriately ambitious drama teacher than by this hacky, borderline-incompetent production, which was directed by Will Gluck from a screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna.
  17. Mr. Turner
    Mr. Turner is a mighty work of critical imagination, a loving, unsentimental portrait of a rare creative soul. But even as it celebrates a glorious painter and illuminates the sources of his pictures with startling clarity and insight, the movie patiently and thoroughly demolishes more than a century’s worth of mythology about what art is and how artists work.
  18. If You Don't, I Will
    If You Don’t, I Will is a dour, acutely observed comedy about marital boredom that doesn’t glamorize or overdramatize the characters’ angst. Its lived-in performances evoke an excruciating stalemate that can be ended only by a radical break.
  19. Goodbye to All That
    Goodbye to All That is very evenhanded in assessing its characters’ flaws, and it never sentimentalizes.
  20. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    Bilbo may fully learn a sense of friendship and duty, and have quite a story to tell, but somewhere along the way, Mr. Jackson loses much of the magic.
  21. We Are the Giant
    We Are the Giant builds up quite a rhetorical head of steam, but it doesn’t try to analyze the conflicts it observes or to fill in the history, except in the broadest sense of placing these uprisings on a list of rebellions that stretch back through millenniums.
  22. Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks
    It’s a cornball odd-couple comedy: Prim older woman meets a brassy young gay man. Still, it’s extraordinary just watching the peerless Ms. Rowlands wring the most out of the repartee in this adaptation of a play by Richard Alfieri.
  23. Skating to New York
    No role is sketched out beyond brush strokes, and no relationship is meaningfully examined.
  24. Tip Top
    The humor of this situation — or of any of the movie’s strained wackiness — doesn’t particularly translate. It also does little to illuminate the more serious commentary on immigration, the legacy of colonialism and the tensions within the country’s Algerian communities.
  25. A Little Game
    Cartoonish in its depiction of class disparities, A Little Game gains some subtlety from its performers: Mr. Abraham, an old pro, does fine work alongside Ms. Ballard, a newcomer.
  26. Little Feet
    Rising above a minuscule budget with ladles of charm and a tender poignancy, Little Feet is a quixotic poem to youthful resourcefulness.
  27. Maidan
    Maidan is a film of scale and immediacy, finding artistry, for better or worse, in bearing witness.
  28. Free the Nipple
    The logistics of raising money and securing permits for the cause are not the most compelling or irreverent subject. The movie’s goal is straightforward advocacy.
  29. Isn't It Delicious
    The film’s tone becomes mawkish, akin to a Lifetime movie that flaunts a little bite before it wallows in melodrama. All wit is vanquished by it, as well as by the slow pace and cheap bits.
  30. Expelled
    The tech-gadget-heavy plotting is so preposterously weak that it’s hard to look past the cheap laughs or half-baked direction.
  31. The Color of Time
    The film is too sincere an expression of admiration for this poet’s work to feel pretentious, but it’s like a music video for the poems, often literal in its biographical readings.
  32. The Captive
    The Captive seems tailor-made to explore the psychological damage that a child can suffer over a lengthy confinement, but instead leans too heavily on the chilly desolation of Paul Sarossy’s cinematography. What’s going on in the victim’s mind, or anyone else’s, is as invisible as what lies beneath the snow.
  33. After The Fall
    After the Fall belongs to a type of movie that is too lazy to connect the dots and fill in the blanks between its supposedly teachable moments.
  34. Exodus: Gods and Kings
    Exodus is ludicrous only by accident, which isn’t much fun and is the surest sign of what we might call a New Testament sensibility at work. But the movie isn’t successfully serious, either... To be fair, there is some good stuff here, too. Mr. Scott is a sinewy storyteller and a connoisseur of big effects.
  35. Top Five
    In setting Andre on his search for self, Mr. Rock has carved out a third way, in the process creating a black character who’s fully human and a comedy that’s wholly a blast.
  36. The Salt of the Earth
    The Salt of the Earth leaves no doubt about Mr. Salgado’s talent or decency, and the chance to spend time in his company is a reason for gratitude. And yet his pictures, precisely because they disclose harsh and unwelcome truths, deserve a harder, more robustly critical look.
  37. Inherent Vice
    Mr. Phoenix’s note-perfect performance flows on the story’s currents of comedy that occasionally turn into rapids, as the funny ha-ha, funny strange back-and-forth abruptly gives way to Three Stooges slapstick.
  38. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    Like one of those machines that can inhale a car and spit out a tidy cube of squashed components, Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is a near-indigestible lump of clips and quips and snipped opinions.
  39. The Pyramid
    The answers aren’t satisfying, and The Pyramid, despite an unpretentious matinee vibe, is mostly interesting in seeing how little light can be on screen before a bare minimum of suspense and coherence dissipates. There is, truly, not much to see in this movie.
  40. Comet
    The visions (a meteor shower, Paris) are romantic and lovely, and there’s a sense of commitment to the enterprise that pretty much overcomes the near bathos and proves involving.
  41. The Barefoot Artist
    Mr. Holsten, was a maker of the winning 2012 documentary “OC87,” a study of obsessive-compulsive disorder. His gift for portraiture shows only further refinement here.
  42. Uzumasa Limelight
    Directing with an old-fashioned tenderness toward his unassuming star, Ken Ochiai conjures a swan song to a waning art form and those who practice it.
  43. She's Beautiful When She's Angry
    As filmmaking, “She’s Beautiful” is meat and potatoes: It gets the job done without frills.
  44. Billy Bates
    Ms. DeLia serves it up in fragmentary fashion, with lots and lots of writhing, brooding, meaningfully vacant stares and so on. Several scenes are in danger of being unintentionally comic.
  45. Take Care
    The film’s director, Liz Tuccillo — a former writer for “Sex and the City,” an author of “He’s Just Not That Into You” and now developing a sitcom for Lauren Graham — is predictably facile with comic rhythms, though her dialogue tilts toward the glib, and her characterizations toward the familiar.
  46. Murder of a Cat
    The film, a first feature from Gillian Greene (wife of the director Sam Raimi, a producer here), has to settle for “sometimes amusing comedy” when it was probably aiming for “cult hit.”
  47. Red Knot
    Lacking a formal script, the actors struggle with a plot so elemental that it might have played more persuasively as a silent-screen melodrama.
  48. Dying of the Light
    The notion of an undercover agent with an untrustworthy mind is a great gimmick — and on a commercial level, Dying of the Light sometimes plays as just another high-concept vehicle for a comically overacting Mr. Cage. But Mr. Schrader’s vision is strong enough to rage against the hackier calculations.
  49. Delusions of Guinevere
    This low-budget film is often static and awkward... Smaller scenes, though, like those when Guinevere interacts with her tough-minded lawyer of a sister or an old classmate from high school, have a realness to them.
  50. The Foxy Merkins
    Behind its transgressive affectations, The Foxy Merkins is a sweet, playful divertissement.
  51. Pioneer
    Mr. Skjoldbjaerg, who also tapped Norwegian history with his bank robbery re-enactment “Nokas,” doesn’t convey a creeping atmosphere of moral rot so much as an irksome glumness.
  52. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
    The film is accessible and often hypnotic on an intuitive level.
  53. Concerning Violence
    The energy here feels more like that of a lecture than of a film; it’s an analytical tonic that’s potent to the point of bitter.
  54. Ungli
    While Mr. D’Silva’s basic structure and pacing are fairly fluid, his movie suffers from Bollywood’s typical kitchen-sink approach to filmmaking.
  55. Still Alice
    The test of realism in a movie like this — the thing that would separate it from a conventional, made-for-television disease melodrama — is whether you can imagine lives for the secondary characters when they aren’t on screen. Still Alice lacks that kind of thickness.
  56. Miss Julie
    Aside from the change of setting, Ms. Ullmann’s version is quite orthodox. Much more convincing than Mike Figgis’s 1999 screen adaptation, starring Saffron Burrows, it is a grueling slog through a hell of torment, cruelty and suffering.
  57. Zero Motivation
    Everything looks authentic, at least on the surface, from the desert dust to the messy desks and the sad, barren barracks. The characters, however, are largely cartoons, and their day-to-day exchanges are as vaguely defined as their interior lives.
  58. Wild
    In its thrilling disregard for the conventions of commercial cinematic storytelling, Wild reveals what some of us have long suspected: that plot is the enemy of truth, and that images and emotions can carry meaning more effectively than neatly packaged scenes or carefully scripted character arcs.
  59. Touch the Wall
    What Touch the Wall lacks is an inventive or compelling presentation. Heavy with platitudes about goals and attitude, it could easily be a short special on ESPN.
  60. Remote Area Medical
    Remote Area Medical, a documentary about the nonprofit organization of that name, certainly shows you what they look like, in blunt, tooth-decaying detail. But beyond that, it maddeningly refuses to take a stand or explore the questions it raises.
  61. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
    This affectionate documentary is more of a bonbon for longtime fans than an entryway for a broader audience.
  62. The Immortalists
    This sly documentary rises above its speculative hook by shifting to show the very human, and very mortal, sides of these would-be warriors of eternity.
  63. The Historian
    The film ultimately lands uneasily on the line between inside and insular, recalling an old saw about universities: The fights are so fierce because the stakes are so small.
  64. Before I Disappear
    Throughout the movie, you have the feeling of being dragged along on an impromptu journey by a filmmaker who is traveling without the benefit of a GPS device.
  65. Antarctica: A Year on Ice
    The extremes of Antarctica: A Year on Ice might seem routine to fans of nature documentaries, but the photographer and director Anthony Powell produces some dazzling imagery in his droll study of isolation way, way down under.
  66. The Babadook
    The brilliance of The Babadook, beyond Ms. Kent’s skillful deployment of the tried-and-true visual and aural techniques of movie horror, lies in its interlocking ambiguities.
  67. The Imitation Game
    The Imitation Game is a highly conventional movie about a profoundly unusual man. This is not entirely a bad thing.
  68. Women Who Flirt
    The film is exaggerated, ludicrous and simplistic. It shows a towering disdain for both men and women. But Angie and Marco have a certain good-natured charm, and there are some nice shots of Shanghai.
  69. Penguins of Madagascar
    The decision to focus on the series’s comic relief has resulted in the loosest and perhaps funniest film of the brand.
  70. Horrible Bosses 2
    What Horrible Bosses 2 lacks in nasty repartee, it tries to make up for in poorly staged comedy chases and break-ins. It is the Hollywood equivalent of a rambunctious little boy pointing to the toilet and squealing, “Mommy, look what I made!”
  71. Little White Lie
    Few moments in recent nonfiction cinema are as piercing as the one in which Ms. Schwartz asks her mother if she might have settled down with Mr. Parker had he not been black.
  72. Kill Dil
    Kill Dil has excellent songs by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, and one memorable, stakes-clarifying dance sequence that juxtaposes two styles.
  73. The Circle
    The sense of an invisible world being revealed is more potent than the film’s fairly standard portrayal of closeted life.
  74. Food Chains
    This emphatic and empathetic documentary (directed by Sanjay Rawal and narrated by Forest Whitaker) presents the plight of our farm laborers as modern-day slavery.
  75. Flamenco, Flamenco
    When a final shot takes us outdoors to the real world, it’s possible to wonder whether a certain spontaneity, or a different kind of energy, has been missing from Mr. Saura’s immaculately vibrant film.
  76. Extraterrestrial
    Underlying this overlong and overheated enterprise is a surfeit of ambition. Maybe too much.
  77. Monk With a Camera
    This superficial movie plays like a fashion shoot with robes.
  78. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
    Even as Ms. Amirpour draws heavily from various bodies of work with vampirelike hunger, she gives her influences new life by channeling them through other cultural forms, including her chador-cloaked vampire.
  79. Death Metal Angola
    The concert itself was a bold, life-affirming project, but with a couple of additional extended music sequences, Mr. Xido’s film might have been more powerful and way more hardcore.
  80. Little Hope Was Arson
    The filmmaker, Theo Love, presents the people in the story as they are, without passing judgment and without apology, whether they are investigators or pastors or just ordinary folks caught up in the inexplicable. It’s Americana unvarnished and, because of that, as absorbing as it is respectful.
  81. The King and the Mockingbird
    In its humor, its fairy tale origins and the characters’ rounded features, it plays more like a vintage Disney work, only nimbler and freer.
  82. Reach Me
    [A] preposterous ensemble piece.
  83. Four Moons
    This quiet romantic drama never soars but keeps its sense of humor and its balance while taking its subject matter for granted in the best possible way.
  84. All Relative
    All Relative, a tepid romantic comedy written and directed by J. C. Khoury, thinks it’s being surprising, but really it’s merely weaving several male sex fantasies together and making nothing insightful out of the resulting story.
  85. Late Phases
    The plot favors simplicity over rationality with a cheerful insouciance that’s hard to dislike.
  86. The Sleepwalker
    With strong assists from the cinematographer Zachary Galler and her ex-husband, the composer Sondre Lerche, Ms. Fastvold, previously a director of music videos, has painted a resonant tableau of dysfunction.
  87. Stones in the Sun
    Ms. Benoit’s screenplay is unapologetically schematic in its depiction of a cross-section of Haitian exiles, but each story forcefully registers.
  88. Story of My Death
    Mr. Serra has said his film portrays the eclipse of Enlightenment rationality by the violent forces of Romanticism. It’s a tidy overarching conceit, but the film’s lived-in feel does make for one vivid way of imagining shifts in thought.
  89. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    The script for Mockingjay Part 1, credited to Peter Craig and Danny Strong, gets the job done, but the performers matter far more than the words they deliver.
  90. Bad Hair
    Bad Hair is an uncomfortably accurate depiction of a poignant mother-son power struggle in a fatherless family in which each knows how to get under the other’s skin.
  91. Happy Valley
    Happy Valley, even as it revisits past events, has a chilling timeliness.
  92. Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets
    A kooky, affectionate tribute that’s happily superficial.
  93. Love Hunter
    In its feel for nocturnal light, this is one of the most refreshing New York independent features since Ramin Bahrani’s “Man Push Cart.” Both acoustically and dramatically, Mr. Mumin is a winning performer.
  94. Occupy the Farm
    Rather than present an evenhanded assessment of the issues at stake, the director, Todd Darling, is so busy fist-pumping for urban farming — and so dazzled by his granola heroes — that naysayers must be demeaned and denigrated.
  95. Beside Still Waters
    Bathed in a nostalgic glow that just avoids maudlin, the group’s problems — a sexless marriage, an unexpected job loss — bark but don’t bite. Scenes flirt with cliché, yet the writing has spark.
  96. Beyond the Lights
    Beyond the Lights may be a fantasy — movies about love, like songs about love, tend to fall into that category — but it is an uncommonly smart and honest fantasy.
  97. Dumb and Dumber To
    The Farrellys are still not much interested in film as a visual medium, and when Lloyd and Harry aren’t smacking each other or dropping their pants, you might as well be listening to a radio play. There’s a story, but it doesn’t matter, certainly not to the leads or the good-natured sidekicks like Kathleen Turner and Rob Riggle.
  98. Levitated Mass
    [A] sneakily compelling documentary.
  99. Wolves
    Silly beyond words, Wolves is indifferently acted and unconvincingly realized.
  100. Rosewater
    Mr. Stewart’s interest in the material is obviously personal, but his movie transcends mere self-interest.
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