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. The Houses October Built
    If you’re relatively easily scared or are in a theater full of people who are, the film might be good for a few screams. But only if you’re the patient sort. It takes almost an hour to get to the good stuff.
  2. Evolution of a Criminal
    Raising significant questions about the psychological effects of poverty on young children, this unsettlingly direct stab at atonement feels genuine.
  3. Kite
    Nasty for nastiness’s sake, Kite drags to achieve its brief running time; you wonder whether the slow motion is an artistic device or a stalling tactic.
  4. I Am Ali
    There’s so much great vintage footage of Ali... and he’s so charismatic, it would be hard to watch the movie and not take something from it.
  5. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her
    Although the novelty of this repetition and Mr. Benson’s adjustments pull you in like a new puzzle, his actual ideas — about people, their stories and how to tell those stories — turn out to be fairly straight.
  6. Kill the Messenger
    The visual choices in the movie, including all the close-ups of Gary’s face as it lightens and darkens, help create the sense that something deeply personal is at stake.
  7. Dracula Untold
    Looking for plausibility in a movie called Dracula Untold is as pointless as looking for humor or personality in Mr. Evans’s dour performance.
  8. The Pact 2
    The directors, Dallas Hallam and Patrick Horvath, are fluent in the genre’s staples (creaky interiors, slamming doors, yada yada yada), lighting schemes and startling edits. And they draw decent work from their actors, who commit to the wispy, subtext-free material.
  9. Catch Hell
    A certain curiosity value arises out of Mr. Phillippe’s coincidental occupation here as a professional actor and a director.
  10. You're Not You
    Despite holes in the storytelling, Ms. Swank and Ms. Rossum keep it real.
  11. Botso
    With enough tragic-restorative plot twists for a 12-hour mini-series, Botso is an enchanting film for two reasons: Mr. Korisheli’s humanity is magnetic, and no more beautiful case could be made for the psychological healing power of making music.
  12. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
    If the movie’s hilariously cruel treatment of the halt and the lame upsets you, you can enjoy the crisp cinematography, operatically repulsive effects and frequently witty dialogue.
  13. One Chance
    The appealing Mr. Corden manages the not insignificant task of maintaining interest in a story whose climax has already been passed around on YouTube.
  14. St. Vincent
    The actors don’t do all the heavy lifting by themselves. The uniformly good performances make it clear that Mr. Melfi knows how to handle actors, and there are some funny bits.
  15. The Judge
    Various secrets come dribbling out... They add up to a sprawl of narrative that is as unconvincing as the suspiciously sprawl-free, nostalgia-tinged town where it all takes place.
  16. Khoobsurat
    Anne Hathaway made a splash in Disney’s “The Princess Diaries,” and the rangy Ms. Kapoor (who descends from a Bollywood dynasty) shares some of her early incandescence, along with a Julia Roberts-like smile.
  17. Bang Bang!
    It’s all high-end flash, but less romantic than wearying.
  18. #Stuck
    Holly is supposed to be out of Guy’s league, but neither of them is up to carrying scene after scene of weak sparring and punny flirting.
  19. Waiting for August
    Soft in tone and muted in color, Waiting for August is a child’s-eye view of one family — among many in today’s Romanian economy — rising to the challenge of living without parents.
  20. Meet the Mormons
    The narration promises surprises (“This story may challenge what you think you know about the roles men and women play in Mormon homes”), but the movie might have started by examining its straw-man conception of the audience.
  21. The Canal
    The film’s writer and director, Ivan Kavanagh, and his team pull off a few enjoyable, decently creepy scares, but over all, the action is too cryptic, and the pedestrian dialogue doesn’t help.
  22. Harmontown
    Mr. Harmon is delightfully talented at improvisation, freestyling nonsense lyrics. Mr. Berkeley, on the other hand, proves himself a dismayingly predictable chronicler, making sure that we know exactly what we’re supposed to think and efficiently packaging jokes and revelations.
  23. Autómata
    There are interesting ideas here, but they are swallowed up in dull, poorly choreographed shootouts and other action nonsense.
  24. The Overnighters
    A blue-collar meditation on the meaning of community and the imperative of compassion, one that endures even as an unexpectedly prurient drama unfolds at its center.
  25. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
    Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is the latest example of a wonderful children’s book turned into a mediocre movie.
  26. Whiplash
    It may get a few things wrong, but it aims at, and finally achieves, an authenticity at once more exalted and more primal than mere verisimilitude.
  27. The Innocents
    Mr. Clayton and Miss Kerr have neglected to interpret the tale and character with sufficient incisiveness and candor to give us a first-rate horror or psychological film. But they've given us one that still has interest and sends some formidable chills down the spine.
  28. The Little Tin Man
    At its best, the movie has a sort of sitcom feel, with swift pacing and delivery, and the strong ensemble cast has a natural rapport.
  29. Haider
    Though the political backdrop often overwhelms or distorts the family drama, Mr. Bhardwaj provides the occasional sharp reminder of how cinematically he can construct Shakespearean moments.
  30. Purgatorio: A Journey Into the Heart of the Border
    This vivid and haunting essay steps away from the debate about illegal immigration.
  31. Drive Hard
    Airless, senseless — and seemingly endless — this clumsy heist movie, directed by the prolific schlockmaster Brian Trenchard-Smith, manages to make even the magnificent coastline of Queensland, Australia, feel dreary.
  32. The Hero of Color City
    The Hero of Color City cannily distills the children’s movie to its lowest common denominator: bright colors flashing on screen.
  33. Stephen King’s A Good Marriage
    While the director, Peter Askin, employs an all-too-customary suspense arsenal (vertiginous stairway perspectives, foreboding thunderstorms, ominous headlights), Mr. King’s script offers a wealth of behavioral details.
  34. Copenhagen
    Mark Raso’s first feature, Copenhagen, takes on a taboo — great for high-stakes storytelling, if it’s not used to generate empty shock. Worry not: His absorbing film has a delicate nuance that will linger after the popcorn’s gone.
  35. The Blue Room
    Mr. Amalric, who directed this dark, delectable, shivery tale, adapting it from the Georges Simenon novel, sets its uneasy, dank mood with energetic economy.
  36. Inner Demons
    The main drawback of Inner Demons, no matter how skillful the presentation may be here, is the overriding sense that this has all been done before.
  37. Fishing Without Nets
    Fishing Without Nets turns the hijacking drama into a morally murky contemplation of deprivation and desperation.
  38. Keep On Keepin' On
    Like other stories of musical tutelage, Keep On Keepin’ On is ultimately an examination of the pursuit of greatness. It is a grueling and demanding endeavor, for sure, but also, for Mr. Terry and anyone lucky enough to enter his orbit, a source of unending joy.
  39. The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin
    The fates of several of the movie’s bitcoin entrepreneurs are unlikely to send viewers rushing to exchange their dollars. But The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin nevertheless functions as an entertaining portrait of the unshakable optimism that governs what’s been called a financial Wild West.
  40. Last Hijack
    This film could have been more surely and deftly put together.
  41. The Liberator
    Perhaps most impressive are the resources deployed in shooting this production. As if the film’s ostentatious aerial vistas, merely functional scene-writing and score weren’t distracting enough, Mr. Sexton’s dialogue freezes dead any simulation of the period with tone-deaf lines amid Bolívar’s impassioned rhetoric.
  42. The Supreme Price
    Joanna Lipper’s documentary shapes one country’s recent history into an accessible and tragic family drama.
  43. The Good Lie
    For all its softening, The Good Lie, like “Monsieur Lazhar,” has a core of decency, humanity and good will that feels authentic. You won’t curse yourself for occasionally tearing up.
  44. The Culture High
    Some of this seems like stoner’s paranoia, and some of the film’s talking heads, mainly comedians, don’t make the best advocates. Over all, though, its experts... argue forcefully for decriminalization.
  45. Annabelle
    Annabelle is less cluttered with creepy bric-a-brac than “The Conjuring.” (The original director, James Wan, produced here.) But Mr. Leonetti embraces the potential of negative space.
  46. Left Behind
    The director, Vic Armstrong — whose lengthy résumé hews primarily toward stunt work — displays no facility with actors and even less with pacing.
  47. Nas: Time Is Illmatic
    Despite some conventional moves here and there and a weakness for the cult of genius, the documentary sustains that uneasy mood cast by Nas’s expression as a child on the “Illmatic” cover, sobered by experience and wisdom before his time.
  48. The Decent One
    The voice-over-driven readings and the illustrative footage — unwisely augmented with new sound effects — lack a fundamental filmic momentum.
  49. Men, Women & Children
    Veering between alarmism and cautious reassurance — between technohysteria and shrugging, nothing-new-under-the-sun resignation — Men, Women & Children succumbs to the confusion it tries to illuminate.
  50. It Was You Charlie
    The film is at once overly eccentric and underdeveloped. It starts as an exercise in bleak absurdism and ends as a Frank Capra Christmas special, with little originality in between.
  51. This Ain't No Mouse Music
    It’s Arhoolie’s musicians — Big Mama Thornton, Flaco Jiménez, Michael Doucet of the Cajun band BeauSoleil and others — who are the true stars. I dare you not to tap your feet.
  52. Advanced Style
    Advanced Style is undeniably captivating, even uplifting at times. But Mr. Cohen and Lina Plioplyte, the director, present a disconcerting mixed message.
  53. Print the Legend
    The movie’s biggest entertainment, however, is not the market-share rivalry between MakerBot Industries, in Brooklyn, and the younger Formlabs, in Boston, but its fearless dive into dweeb-culture head space.
  54. Harlem Street Singer
    A labor of love and respect.
  55. Hellaware
    The old story of art as a refuge for scoundrels and callow youth is amusing and updated with assorted details.
  56. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    Mr. Ridley’s ambitions and refusal to treat Hendrix as a solvable mystery are welcome, given how often biopics re-embalm their subjects. Here, a legend is born, and a man too.
  57. Believe Me
    The film’s congeniality, however, in no way dulls its humor or the sharpness of its observations.
  58. Pride
    It is the kind of hearty, blunt-force drama with softened edges that leaves audiences applauding and teary-eyed.
  59. The Boxtrolls
    While The Boxtrolls does follow kiddie-action genre conventions in its big, noisy climax — a hectic brawl of explosions, collisions and oversize machines — it also finds an impressive number of quiet, eccentric and haunting moments along the way.
  60. The Equalizer
    Mr. Fuqua, while not the world’s most subtle filmmaker, directs the action sequences with bluntness and clarity and effectively uses his star as an oasis of calm in a jumpy, nasty universe.
  61. The Two Faces of January
    There’s a mystery here, some thrills and blood, but mostly there are beautiful people and the kind of human hunger that devours everything and everyone in sight.
  62. Asmodexia
    If the twisty finale underwhelms, Mr. Carreté’s enigmatic style and textured images offer their own doomy rewards.
  63. The Little Bedroom
    The Little Bedroom is a gentle, melancholy drama so pale and tentative that its very colors appear washed away by grief.
  64. Not Cool
    A raunchy comedy that is so poorly executed and so unfunny that no one involved with it should ever be allowed to work in the movies again.
  65. Björk: Biophilia Live
    As skillful an orchestrator as Björk is, her crescendos and tightly designed wilderness can lose their strength with repetition. But she and her collaborators do make a pretty singing picture with their chosen audiovisual tool set.
  66. Lilting
    For much of the movie, Junn is a one-dimensional grump who pulls this schematic if unfocused movie down with each frown and harrumph.
  67. Two Night Stand
    It’s hard not to root for this couple — and, more to the point, these actors — to get together again.
  68. The Song
    The actors, none of whom have much experience, are quite convincing, but the story — Jed falls, then sees the error of his ways — is an oft-told one.
  69. Plastic
    It’s hard to escape the sense that Plastic is itself a cheap knockoff, but the point is not to look too closely.
  70. Gone Girl
    At its strongest, Gone Girl plays like a queasily, at times gleefully, funny horror movie about a modern marriage, one that has disintegrated partly because of spiraling downward mobility and lost privilege. Yet, as sometimes happens in Mr. Fincher’s work, dread descends like winter shadows, darkening the movie’s tone and visuals until it’s snuffed out all the light, air and nuance.
  71. Hollidaysburg
    Hollidaysburg is a pleasant if unremarkable coming-of-age film.
  72. Henry & Me
    The animated tale Henry & Me aims to inspire sick children, but it also aims to promote the Yankees and the team’s mythology. The two goals don’t mesh very well.
  73. Reclaim
    This isn’t activism; it’s by-the-numbers suspense.
  74. Iceman
    Best of all, Mr. Law doesn’t skimp on wide-screen compositions; this is one movie designed for the theater, not the couch.
  75. Brush with Danger
    Although the characters repeatedly express their worship of “original art” in gilded frames, the script consists of singularly unoriginal dialogue.
  76. Art and Craft
    Art and Craft adds fuel to the argument that the art market is a rigged game manipulated by curators and gallerists spouting mumbo-jumbo.
  77. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    Mr. Pegg, normally a live wire, makes an affable hero, but the movie often forces him into blandly earnest mugging.
  78. Life's a Breeze
    Life’s a Breeze is ultimately about as cutting and memorable as its title.
  79. Stop the Pounding Heart
    Its scenes, quiet and undramatic, are nonetheless suffused with an almost lyrical intensity, and its sympathy is as limitless as its curiosity.
  80. Swim Little Fish Swim
    Mumbly dialogue, relentlessly jittery camerawork, a star who is also co-director and co-writer: Yes, it’s time for another movie that mistakes the claustrophobic world of young New York artsy types for something interesting.
  81. A Life in Dirty Movies
    Wiktor Ericsson’s A Life in Dirty Movies outlines this filmmaker’s work reasonably well, but, somewhat surprisingly, truly hits home with a heartwarming look at Mr. Sarno’s relationship with his wife, Peggy.
  82. Fort Bliss
    Ms. Myers too often tells rather than shows, and she doesn’t have the cinematic skill set to transform her idea into a fully satisfying movie, especially at this low-budget level.
  83. Pump
    The movie goes beyond alarmism with solutions that on the surface would seem to find common ground between environmental advocacy and unfettered capitalism.
  84. Space Station 76
    Not that Dr. Bot and the oblivious self-righteousness won’t delight certain fans, but this remains a protracted, scattershot comedy sketch that never quite nails its tone.
  85. Tusk
    The result is so out there that you can imagine Mr. Smith and his collaborators rolling in the aisles at their own preposterousness. If you can find your inner 16-year-old, you might just join them.
  86. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    Nasty, brutal and unforgiving, A Walk Among the Tombstones is one of those rare contemporary cinematic offerings: intelligent pulp.
  87. This Is Where I Leave You
    There is almost nothing here that you haven’t seen a dozen times before, and even the surprises feel flat and familiar. More dispiriting still is that this drab complacency is wrapped around messages of daring, honesty and spontaneity.
  88. The Maze Runner
    A perfectly serviceable entry in the young-adult dystopian sweepstakes.
  89. The Zero Theorem
    Even as Mr. Gilliam assails the tedium and pointlessness of Qohen’s existence, The Zero Theorem succumbs to those forces, spinning its wheels and repeating its jokes in a manic frenzy that is never as funny or as mind-blowing as it wants to be.
  90. Tracks
    As it turns out, nothing else in Tracks matches the dramatic pow of a camel being relieved of his testes. Despite the otherworldly scenery and some predictable tragedy — Robyn can be maddeningly careless about the welfare of her animals — this proves to be a rather logy amble.
  91. 20,000 Days on Earth
    It is as intimate and honest a portrait of a rock artist’s creative roots as any film has attempted.
  92. The Guest
    Mr. Stevens’s watchful restraint gives the early scenes a slow burn and a sinister glaze.
  93. No Good Deed
    Even without Mr. Rice in the news, No Good Deed would be damaged goods: an inert “Cape Fear” rehash that can’t seem to choose its favorite contrivance.
  94. The Frontier
    The film means well but feels generic, strained and claustrophobic (despite several scenes at a deserted beach), with tight close-ups and sudden confrontations.
  95. Finding Fanny
    Ms. Kapadia, now 57 and a Bollywood star since she made a splash in “Bobby,” at 16, inhabits and enhances her role. So, too, does the younger star Deepika Padukone, who plays her widowed daughter-in-law with an uncloying sweetness. But the men flounder.
  96. 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.
  97. The Pirates
    Neither the action nor the comedy in this action comedy is consistently strong.
  98. Alumbrones
    Short and sweet and limited.
  99. The Quitter
    The two leads are so low-key that they almost disappear at times, but The Quitter is a textured, heartfelt drama that achieves its modest goals.
  100. Take Me to the River
    Just keep your eyes on the old folks; they are where the heart — and the sweet soul music — of this movie lies.
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