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. Miss Meadows
    The dark comedy (punctuated by the catchphrase “Toodle-oo”) doesn’t always come off, and the filmmaking is more off-kilter than necessary, with capricious camerawork and pacing.
  2. The Homesman
    The Homesman is both a captivating western and a meticulous, devastating feminist critique of the genre.
  3. Drug Lord: The Legend of Shorty
    Driven by mostly Spanish-language folk music, the movie provides a potent if piecemeal counterbalance to the sensationalism of “Breaking Bad.”
  4. Brahmin Bulls
    Mr. Pailoor (who wrote the screenplay with Anu Pradhan) shows a taste for blunt metaphor... It’s hard to find fault with the performances, though, particularly Mr. Seth’s.
  5. Always Woodstock
    This is a movie that runs on magical thinking.
  6. Starry Eyes
    A pretty young actress. A casting call. A private meeting with the lecherous man who has the power to give her the role. Starry Eyes tries to wring a horror movie out of this tired old setup but, halfway in, seems to realize it has nothing new to offer and becomes a mere gorefest.
  7. Penance
    Mr. Kurosawa expertly modulates an uncanny flow of energies between shame and grief, between venal urges and high-minded moral demands. The women’s travails suggest something that’s part curse, part mythic cycle of guilt and part kaleidoscopic dread.
  8. Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas
    Saving Christmas seems determined to win any perceived war on Christmas through brute force.
  9. Thou Wast Mild and Lovely
    The setup’s clichés grow harder to ignore, despite a welcome mischievous streak and some bucolic imagery.
  10. Butter on the Latch
    Butter on the Latch thrives on its casually true snapshots of confusion and connection.
  11. Bad Turn Worse
    A juicy neo-noir like Bad Turn Worse doesn’t have to make total sense to grab you.
  12. Foxcatcher
    Mr. Miller does his finest work with his three superb leads.
  13. Red Army
    Good sports movies are always about more than sports... Red Army touches on themes of friendship and perseverance, and also offers a compact and vivid summary of recent Russian history.
  14. Open Windows
    Smothered by a storm of visual tics — and the tiniest of nods to “Rear Window” (1954) — any social commentary takes second place to multitasking gimmickry.
  15. Hangar 10
    Saving most of its special-effects pennies until the final five minutes, Hangar 10 struggles to build a science-fiction movie from little more than a ghost of an idea and an infamous location.
  16. Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain
    This is crudely mounted, earnest advocacy, getting its points across at any cost.
  17. On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter
    Motorbikes careening round corners just millimeters off the track still quicken the pulse, but “The Next Chapter” also demonstrates the padding that documentaries in general have picked up in recent years.
  18. Sex Ed
    Unevenly directed by Isaac Feder, Sex Ed droops.
  19. 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.
  20. Fugly!
    Mr. Leguizamo, 50, still has charisma, but with his maniacal stage persona barely seen and the themes recycled from earlier projects, Fugly! is a dud.
  21. 21 Years: Richard Linklater
    The luminaries in “21” pay deserving tribute to Mr. Linklater. Soon, perhaps, so will the Academy
  22. A Merry Friggin' Christmas
    It’s a testament to Williams’s energy that even in an unfortunate part as Virgil, an angry, alcoholic dad, he comes across as the most vivid member of the cast.
  23. Why Don't You Play in Hell?
    Goofball antics and a terrific, raucous finale can’t make up for the essential slackness of its repetitive comedy and punk chest thumping.
  24. Viva la Libertà
    Roberto Andò's Viva la Libertà wobbles between being wispily suggestive of finer existential meaning and generational commentary, and being basically a handsomely dressed-up “Dave” for post-Berlusconi Italy.
  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. Elsa & Fred
    Ms. MacLaine and Mr. Plummer make an especially compatible match, because his understated portrayal of a despairing misanthrope reins in her scenery-chewing exhibitionism.
  27. Warsaw Uprising
    Warsaw Uprising is marred by a fictional audio drama among three characters (two cameraman brothers and an American airman) who provide an unnecessary, distracting and at times amateurish frame to this resourcefully, even wittily, edited tour. But the flaws don’t detract from the film’s casual and calamitous sights.
  28. The Way He Looks
    This winning movie — directed by Daniel Ribeiro, making his feature debut — dexterously weaves the social challenges of adolescence into a story of broader self-discovery.
  29. Virunga
    Showcasing the best and the worst in human nature, Orlando von Einsiedel’s devastating documentary “Virunga” wrenches a startlingly lucid narrative from a sickening web of bribery, corruption and violence.
  30. The Better Angels
    The sense of predestination hangs heavily over the movie, but not a sense of life.
  31. West
    West, for all its intensity, becomes too bogged down in detail to be as strong as it might have been.
  32. The Tower
    In its stunted theatrical version, the second half is a sketchy digest of events that leaves you feeling cheated.
  33. Getting to the Nutcracker
    This is a sympathetic, even sweet, account, but it’s too soft.
  34. Actress
    Mr. Greene’s impressionistic style and rough, off-center compositions create an atmosphere of intimacy, as if the viewer were being invited to read Ms. Burre’s diary or her mind.
  35. Jessabelle
    Jessabelle is depressingly rote.
  36. Big Hero 6
    Big Hero 6 is good enough to transcend its blah ending and to make the case that every superhero story should be entirely animated.
  37. The Theory of Everything
    Yes, The Theory of Everything has a different emphasis. But like so many cinematic lives of the famous, it loses track of the source of its subject’s fame.
  38. The Lookalike
    Nonstop scheming and some grimy New Orleans locations prevent The Lookalike from being boring. But the movie, instead of embracing its budgetary limitations, gives off a distracting sense of trying to punch above its weight class.
  39. National Gallery
    Like most of Mr. Wiseman’s work, the movie is at once specific and general, fascinating in its pinpoint detail and transporting in its cosmic reach.
  40. Interstellar
    Like the great space epics of the past, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar distills terrestrial anxieties and aspirations into a potent pop parable, a mirror of the mood down here on Earth.
  41. Happy New Year
    Shah Rukh Khan’s seasoned authority is a steady anchor amid the frantic contrivances.
  42. True Son
    Rough-hewed but naturally inspirational, True Son gains heft from its portrait of a city sharply segregated by race and income.
  43. Private Peaceful
    With its fusty air and glumly earnest performances, this unnecessary reminder of Steven Spielberg’s soppy 2011 staging of another of Mr. Morpurgo’s novels, “War Horse,” is about as entertaining as trench mouth.
  44. Point and Shoot
    [An] incisive, queasy-making documentary.
  45. Plot for Peace
    A fascinating account of off-the-books diplomacy in the 1980s, “Plot for Peace” is that rare documentary that both augments the historical record and is paced like a thriller.
  46. Magical Universe
    While Mr. Workman evidently respects Mr. Carbee’s talent, he also frames his movie as a trite narrative about a kind of lovably odd acquaintance who comes out of his shell, without many incisive ideas about shaping or broadening the material.
  47. Hit by Lightning
    Even with a few late twists, concept exceeds execution.
  48. The Hadza: Last of the First
    Articulate and sympathetic experts, a calmly authoritative narrator (Alfre Woodard), powerfully conversational subtitles and breathtaking scenery enliven the film’s message.
  49. All You Need Is Love
    Only during a brief scene of a man catching a fish outside his flooded house does the movie seem interested in anything more than raising awareness.
  50. Bitter Honey
    There is nothing remotely salacious about Bitter Honey, an agonizing documentary examination of polygamy in Bali, Indonesia, from the U.C.L.A. anthropologist Robert Lemelson. There is only vivid evidence of a society that, despite limp efforts at discouraging domestic abuse, remains mired in ancient patriarchy, sanctioning polygamy and, implicitly, often attendant violence.
  51. Braddock America
    A blue collar poem threaded with old-timer memories and present-day pain, Braddock America pays bittersweet tribute to a once-thriving Pennsylvania steel town and those who stuck around to bear witness to its decline.
  52. Blood Ransom
    It’s all very solemn, convoluted and a bit bloody, but not engrossing, despite impressive cinematography by Jasmin Kuhn and Mr. dela Torre and the best efforts of a hard-working cast.
  53. Horns
    There are so many red herrings and plot twists, such a dense barrage of flashbacks and quick cuts, that you may find yourself as rattled and breathless as Ig himself. And a bit let down at the end, when all the noise, color and energy resolve into a basic whodunit decked out in weak special effects and spiritual swamp gas.
  54. Before I Go to Sleep
    If it weren’t for the diligent performances of its stars, who inject some emotional depth into this bogus claptrap, Before I Go to Sleep would be an unwatchable, titter-inducing catastrophe.
  55. Nightcrawler
    Nightcrawler is a slick and shallow movie desperate, like Lou himself, to be something more.
  56. Revenge of the Mekons
    The film is both a generous primer on the band, which grew out of the punk movement in Leeds, England, in 1977, and a celebration of its longevity.
  57. The Great Invisible
    Margaret Brown’s quietly infuriating documentary film about the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, includes depressing information that many would probably be happier not knowing.
  58. Goodbye to Language 3D
    It is baffling and beautiful, a flurry of musical and literary snippets arrayed in counterpoint to a series of brilliantly colored and hauntingly evocative pictures.
  59. Tiger Lily Road
    Tiger Lily Road aims for the bleak humor of a Coen brothers film, but a jaunty sitcom score spoils the tone. There’s barely an action that doesn’t strain credulity.
  60. Life of Riley
    Life of Riley is neither especially profound nor riotously funny. An element of caricature is palpable in the performances but restrained.
  61. White Bird in a Blizzard
    Its elements don’t really cohere.
  62. Low Down
    Low Down stumbles into the pitfalls of both addiction narratives and observer-style autobiography, even if Ms. Albany’s memoir suggests even rougher times. But it still catches in-between moments of closeness that aren’t always seen or heard.
  63. The Heart Machine
    This New York drama in some ways finds new names for age-old insecurities among men and women, though it doesn’t entirely deliver on its promising buildup.
  64. Algorithms
    The movie is an object lesson in how a remarkable subject can be turned into a less remarkable film.
  65. 1,000 Times Good Night
    What makes 1,000 Times Good Night more than a dramatic essay on wartime journalism is Ms. Binoche’s wrenchingly honest portrayal of a woman of conscience driven by a mixture of guilt, nobility and self-importance, reckoning belatedly with her destructive impulses.
  66. Revenge of the Green Dragons
    What initially feels like brash energy peters out until what’s left mainly evokes pretty ordinary gangster movies.
  67. Stonehearst Asylum
    This shockingly flabby effort from Mr. Anderson — who, in features like “The Machinist” (2004) and “Session 9” (2001), showed a much surer hand with oppressive atmospheres and troubled psyches — feels as nutty as its characters.
  68. Laggies
    This is a nice movie. It’s frisky and cheerful, even when tears are on the way. But it isn’t a very good movie, mainly because, like its heroine, it’s reluctant to make up its mind about what it wants to be.
  69. 23 Blast
    Although the film has moments when it’s serious about exploring the challenges that someone in Travis’s situation faces, it ultimately prefers to be just another football movie with a hokey big-game ending.
  70. Viktor
    In a way, the occasionally lugubrious undertones and casual cruelties suit the setting, but the tragic heft Mr. Martinez seems to be pushing for doesn’t materialize.
  71. Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me
    The film is a rare combination of instructive and poignant.
  72. Exists
    Featuring the usual fractured visuals, generic victims and pinballing cameras — both hand-held and mounted on bike helmets — Exists nevertheless has an unusually dreamy opening and a few surprisingly entertaining tweaks.
  73. Ouija
    What Ouija lacks in wit and originality, it makes up in volume — a trademark of the “Transformers” director Michael Bay, who is one of the producers.
  74. John Wick
    Harboring few ambitions beyond knock-your-socks-off action sequences, this crafty revenge thriller delivers with so much style — and even some wit — that the lack of substance takes longer than it should to become problematic.
  75. Force Majeure
    This brilliant, viciously amusing takedown of bourgeois complacency, gender stereotypes and assumptions and the illusion of security rubs your face in human frailty as relentlessly as any Michael Haneke movie.
  76. Citizenfour
    Cinema, even in the service of journalism, is always more than reporting, and focusing on what Ms. Poitras’s film is about risks ignoring what it is. It’s a tense and frightening thriller that blends the brisk globe-trotting of the “Bourne” movies with the spooky, atmospheric effects of a Japanese horror film. And it is also a primal political fable for the digital age, a real-time tableau of the confrontation between the individual and the state.
  77. 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.
  78. The Golden Era
    This tribute is overlong and too reverent, conveying little sense of Xiao Hong the person and even less of her talent.
  79. Relationship Status: It's Complicated
    Mr. Payet, who is one of the film’s directors and screenwriters, is a comedy star in France, and this movie is facile with its comic rhythms and dramatic flow.
  80. A Requiem for Syrian Refugees
    A Requiem for Syrian Refugees is as powerfully direct as it is unfortunately heavy-handed, with lingering black-and-white close-ups of barbed wire and children’s wide eyes. But the film is eloquent, too, thanks to the voices of the refugees themselves.
  81. Watchers of the Sky
    Watchers of the Sky is a film that can dash hopes about humanity but also raise them in depicting the stories of these tireless defenders.
  82. Eternity: The Movie
    There’s much more dead air than laughs, despite a certain anything-goes enthusiasm from the leads.
  83. Summer of Blood
    It’s all mellowly funny rather than creepy, something like a stand-up conceit elaborated into scenes.
  84. Default
    The film is stronger with its moment-to-moment tension than with its cynical, shallow media satire.
  85. Young Ones
    This spare but potent melodrama revels in the desiccated landscapes provided by South Africa and photographed with dusty purity by Giles Nuttgens. Through his lens, the spectrum of sunbaked skin and parched dunes is as rich as any rainbow.
  86. Felony
    the Australian drama Felony proves only that skilled actors and slick photography can tart up even the most problematic script.
  87. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    Exquisitely drawn with both watercolor delicacy and a brisk sense of line, the film finds a peculiarly moving undertow of feeling in a venerable Japanese folk tale.
  88. The Best of Me
    The screenplay is so haphazardly constructed that when the movie seems to be ending, it refuels with preposterous new developments.
  89. The Book of Life
    This often beautiful and too-often moribund, if exhaustingly frenetic, feature tends to be less energetic than the dead people waltzing through it.
  90. The Hacker Wars
    Ms. Weisman offers a deluge of information. But for those not already versed in the lingo or the people involved, the movie plays like a blurry primer to an anarchic, mysterious world.
  91. Rudderless
    Rudderless, the misbegotten directorial debut of William H. Macy, is so dishonest, manipulative and ultimately infuriating that it never recovers after its bombshell revelation two-thirds of the way into the movie.
  92. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    The camerawork in Birdman is an astonishment, and an argument that everything flows together, which in this movie means the cinematography, the story, the people, even time and space.
  93. Camp X-Ray
    Despite the movie’s gripping performances and the verisimilitude of many elements, I simply don’t believe the story.
  94. Dear White People
    You want to see this movie, and you will want to talk about it afterward, even if the conversation feels a little awkward. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong. There is great enjoyment to be found here, and very little comfort.
  95. Fury
    Within this gore-spattered, superficially nihilistic carapace is an old-fashioned platoon picture, a sensitive and superbly acted tale of male bonding under duress.
  96. Listen Up Philip
    Words do more than hurt, they also slash and burn in this sharp, dyspeptic, sometimes gaspingly funny exploration of art and life, men and women, being and nonbeing, and the power and limits of language.
  97. The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga
    This two-track meditation wraps ethereal glimpses of age-old Slavic locales around a fairy tale told through hand-drawn illustrations.
  98. Diplomacy
    The value of Diplomacy is that it produces at least as much unsettlement as relief, compelling the viewer to remain haunted by nightmarish thoughts of what might have happened.
  99. Addicted
    The actors are uniformly handsome and mostly serviceable, though the same can’t be said about the filmmaking or the writing.
  100. Awake: The Life of Yogananda
    The film’s storytelling is straightforward, almost standard-issue, but the story itself is compelling, as is the testimony of devotees.
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