The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,269 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: 9,377 out of 20269
  2. Mixed: 8,428 out of 20269
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20269
20269 movie reviews
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  1. Summer Hours
    In spite of its modest scale, tactful manner and potentially dowdy subject matter, is packed nearly to bursting with rich meaning and deep implication.
  2. Traffic
    May be the first Hollywood movie since Robert Altman's "Nashville" to infuse epic cinematic form with jittery new rhythms and a fresh, acid- washed palette.
  3. The Grifters
    The Grifters moves with swift unsentimental resolve toward a last act as bleak as any in recent American screen literature. In a less skillful work, it would be a downer. The Grifters is so good that one leaves the theater on a spellbound high. [5 Dec 1990]
    • The New York Times
  4. Talk to Her
    When it's over, the realization of how much the movie means to you really sinks in; you can't get it out of your heart.
  5. Our Daily Bread
    Nikolaus Geyrhalter's superb documentary is an unblinking, often disturbing look at industrial food production from field to factory.
  6. The Strawberry Blonde
    Its amiable, infectious quality lies in the seriocomic way it re-creates the Eighteen Nineties culture of New York — horse-and-buggy courtships, dancing at beer gardens, Sunday afternoon street music and maybe an occasional brawl.
  7. Hummingbirds
    Hummingbirds is pretty tight filmmaking at less than 80 minutes, and the laid-back presentation makes the political commentary register strongly from the periphery.
  8. The Master
    It is a movie about the lure and folly of greatness that comes as close as anything I've seen recently to being a great movie. There will be skeptics, but the cult is already forming. Count me in.
  9. Boys Don't Cry
    Stunning...a film much tougher and more transfixing than its wan title.
  10. The Wild Pear Tree
    The unapologetic, sometimes heavy-handed literariness of The Wild Pear Tree is leavened by hints of grim comedy and sharp, if subtle, social criticism.
  11. My Imaginary Country
    While this is a first-person documentary, with the director providing voice-over narration, it expresses a poignant humility and a patient willingness to listen.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Distant Voices, Still Lives
    One of those dimly realized personal statements that ultimately says a lot less than the written program notes that accompany it.
  13. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
    Ms. Story’s unconventional approach provokes responses that a traditional facts-and-figures discussion might not. Yet the film’s formal abstraction, far from creating emotional distance, is unexpectedly moving.
  14. Aladdin
    The fundamentals here go beyond first-rate: animation both gorgeous and thoughtful, several wonderful songs and a wealth of funny minor figures on the sidelines, practicing foolproof Disney tricks. Only when it comes to the basics of the story line does Aladdin encounter any difficulties.
  15. Los Angeles Plays Itself
    Los Angeles Plays Itself, in spite of its length, is rarely tedious, an achievement it owes mainly to the movies it prodigiously excerpts.
  16. Sentimental Value
    Trier’s lightness of touch makes a striking contrast to the film’s emotional weightiness. Death haunts this movie, as it does other of Trier’s features, and while “Sentimental Value” has bursts of pure comedy (it can be very funny), it’s steeped in melancholy.
  17. This Is England
    A modest, near-flawless gem, This Is England is the fifth feature by the young British director Shane Meadows, doing his best work since he first hit the festival scene in the mid-1990s with his hilarious, raw-hewn shorts “Small Time.”
  18. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
    Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a perfect entry point into Hamaguchi’s work. Not every episode works equally well or hits as hard, but both times I watched this movie, I found something to admire, consider, argue with and weep over.
  19. City of Ghosts
    More information and in-depth analysis, as well as greater restraint in the use of atrocity images, might have deepened a movie that leans on shortcuts and visual shocks.
  20. Springtime in a Small Town
    As Mark Li Ping-bing's beautiful cinematography observes the change of season, the movie becomes a broader meditation on rebirth, and how, in the language of T. S. Eliot, April, the month that stirs such hopes for the future, is also "the cruellest month" for awakening such keen desire.
  21. The Player
    So entertaining, so flip and so genially irreverent that it seems to announce the return of the great gregarious film maker whose "Nashville" remains one of the classics of the 1970's.
  22. The Son
    To call The Son a masterpiece would be to insult its modesty. Like the homely, useful boxes Olivier teaches his prodigals to build, it is sturdy, durable and, in its downcast, unobtrusive way, miraculous.
  23. Sweet Sixteen
    Sweet Sixteen shows that he's (Loach) as capable of anger as his protagonist and just as eager to draw attention to an unchanging problem: the blight of generational poverty.
  24. Ponyo
    The latest masterwork from Hayao Miyazaki, places emphasis on the natural world, its tumults and fragility.
  25. The Last Detail
    The Last Detail is one superbly funny, uproariously intelligent performance, plus two others that are very, very good, which are so effectively surrounded by profound bleakness that it seems to be a new kind of anti-comedy. You'll laugh at it, not through your tears but with a sense of creeping misery.
  26. Strong Island
    This potent film gives equal weight to complex emotions as well as bare facts. In the same way, it’s not just the story of a man’s death, but also a study of the aftermath.
  27. The Interrupters
    The stories in The Interrupters, a hard wallop of a documentary, may weigh heavily on your heart and head, but they will also probably infuriate you.
  28. Ernest & Célestine
    Mostly, Ernest & Celestine is an ode to the happiness that comes from being with those different from us.
  29. American Factory
    Complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped.
  30. Only Angels Have Wings
    When you add it all up, Only Angels Have Wings comes to an overly familiar total. It's a fairly good melodrama, nothing more.
  31. First Reformed
    It is the portrait of a soul in torment, all the more powerful for being so rigorously conceived and meticulously executed.
  32. Milla
    Milla is a major achievement, a film that is at once as delicate as it is strong, a fitting testament to motherhood, to survival.
  33. Z
    An immensely entertaining movie -- a topical melodrama that manipulates our emotional responses and appeals to our best prejudices in such satisfying ways that it is likely to be mistaken as a work of fine -- rather than popular -- movie art.
  34. Baby Driver
    There’s much to enjoy in Baby Driver, including the satisfactions of genuine cinematic craft and technique, qualities that moviegoers can no longer take for granted.
  35. A Little Prayer
    This is a filmmaker able to wrest real feeling from his actors, and from his audience.
  36. The Bad and the Beautiful
    It is a crowded and colorful picture, but it is choppy, episodic and vague.
  37. The Silence of the Lambs
    All sorts of macabre things have gone on, and are still going on just offscreen, in Jonahan Demme's swift, witty new suspence thriller.[14 February 1991]
    • The New York Times
  38. Sabaya
    Mahmud and Ziyad, volunteers at the Yazidi Home Center in Syria, will make several more such trips over the course of the film, and hundreds more after the cameras stop rolling. Their task is enormous, and it demands a stoicism that Hirori’s intrepid, immersive filmmaking mirrors.
  39. Beasts of the Southern Wild
    This movie is a blast of sheer, improbable joy, a boisterous, thrilling action movie with a protagonist who can hold her own alongside Katniss Everdeen, Princess Merida and the other brave young heroines of 2012.
  40. Let the Fire Burn
    Let the Fire Burn relentlessly sustains its tragic momentum.
  41. The Juniper Tree
    In watching a newly restored version, I was struck not only by Björk’s distinctive charisma at 24 years old but also by the talent of the film’s writer, director and editor, Nietzchka Keene.
  42. Last Train Home
    Mr. Fan's documentary is informed by a melancholy humanism, and finds unexpected beauty in almost unbearably harsh circumstances. It tells the story of a family caught, and possibly crushed, between the past and the future - a story that, on its own, is moving, even heartbreaking. Multiplied by 130 million, it becomes a terrifying and sobering panorama of the present.
  43. Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
    Newnham and LeBrecht deftly juggle a large cast of characters past and present, accomplishing the not-so-easy task of making all the personalities distinct, and a build a fair amount of suspense in their nearly day-by-day account of the sit-in.
  44. Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film
    The movie is an entirely absorbing, occasionally revelatory portrait of a brilliant talent driven to greatness by an inner chorus of demons and angels.
  45. Persona
    Persona is at once tactile and elusive, splintered and seamless, systematic and free-associative. Essentially a movie of fragments and vignettes, it is held together by the power of the artist’s craft and the centripetal force of his unconscious.
  46. Desire
    You will not, in Desire, find a great story, but you will discover one that has been splendidly told. If it is a Lubitsch production, constantly highlighted by those indefinable touches of his, still one should not overlook the skill of its director, Frank Borzage; its excellent camera work, or the performances.
  47. One Fine Morning
    The story’s ellipses and graceful structure are certainly admirable, but what elevates One Fine Morning is the texture of Sandra’s emotions, the revelation of her character, the hunger of her embrace, the wildness of her mouth, the stillness of her sated body, and the love that she gives and will movingly embrace once more.
  48. The Double Life of Veronique
    The Double Life of Veronique doesn't end. About three-quarters of the way through, it starts to dissolve, like mist, so that by the time it is actually over the screen seems to have been blank for some time.
  49. Flight of the Red Balloon
    In the end what elevates Mr. Hou’s films to the sublime -- and this one comes close at times -- are not the stories but their telling.
  50. No Other Choice
    No Other Choice is easy to admire from one perfectly balanced shot to the next; it is a pleasure to see how Park plays with visual space and deploys some of the more slapstick comedy with sharply timed, Rube Goldberg-style finesse. If only the movie’s tones and moods were as modulated as its two vibrant, often touching lead performances.
  51. Blue Film
    I left this movie with an exhilarated kind of heaviness. Here is a work of art that wants to know what makes us us. There’s no caution. I don’t sense any compromise, either. Nor do I detect judgment. We’re being trusted with these souls, entrusted with them.
  52. The Gleaners & I
    She (Varda) plucks images and stories from the world around her, finding beauty and nourishment in lives and activities the world prefers to ignore.
  53. The Last Seduction
    A devilishly entertaining crime story with a heroine who must be seen to be believed, is as satisfying an ensemble piece as Red Rock West.
  54. My Father's Shadow
    It’s that sharp contrast of beauty with an undercurrent of pain that makes “My Father’s Shadow” so bittersweet, and it’s why it cuts to the quick.
  55. A Real Pain
    A Real Pain is a fluidly blended amalgam of pleasing, approachable subgenres, including an odd-couple buddy flick, a consciousness-raising road movie and a charged family melodrama.
  56. Sabotage
    A masterly exercise in suspense. His new film is imperfect narrative, but perfect dramaturgy.
  57. Before Night Falls
    Like a deathbed dream it leapfrogs through Arenas's life, reconstructing crucial moments as a succession of bright, feverish illuminations.
  58. Atlantics
    It testifies to the variety and vitality of politically alert genre filmmaking. It’s a suspenseful, sensual, exciting movie, and therefore a deeply haunting one as well.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wake in Fright (1971)
    Since Outback is a film I mostly admire, I had better allow that it is not without flaws. But they are flaws—in plotting, in Kotcheff's penchant for using five camera positions at a time where one might do—that may be, not overlooked, but safely admitted in a work that really does move from its strengths rather than its weaknesses.
  60. Waking Life
    So verbally dexterous and visually innovative that you can't absorb it unless you have all your wits about you. And even then, you may want to see it again to enjoy its subtle humor and warm humanity.
  61. The Green Knight
    The Green Knight is always interesting — and occasionally baffling — but at the end it rises to a swirling, feverish pitch of feeling and philosophical earnestness.
  62. The First Wave
    The film succeeds in presenting an on-the-ground view of what it felt like to be inside a hospital in the spring of 2020. It was harrowing, death was everywhere and there was no end in sight.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Five Easy Pieces
    At first appears to be rich with a quantity of felt life, but on reflection seems both more carefully studied and more coldly casual than profoundly understood.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    From Here to Eternity
    Out of "From Here to Eternity," a novel whose anger and compassion stirred a post-war reading public as few such works have, Columbia and a company of sensitive hands have forged a film almost as towering and persuasive as its source...Stands as a shining example of truly professional moviemaking.
  65. The Bourne Ultimatum
    Mr. Greengrass knows how to do his job, and there’s no one in Hollywood right now who does action better, who keeps the pace going so relentlessly, without mercy or letup, scene after hard-rocking scene.
  66. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    Childhood ends, this time forever, with tears and howls, swirls of smoke, the shock of mortality and bittersweet smiles in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the grave, deeply satisfying final movie in the series.
  67. Tea with the Dames
    I would not have minded a bit if the dames were given twice the amount of time this trim film allowed.
  68. Athlete A
    Cohen and Shenk amplify the voices of the survivors while recognizing that Nassar’s arrest doesn’t dissipate the pain or deep-rooted exploitation.
  69. Take Shelter
    It is a quiet, relentless exploration of the latent (and not so latent) terrors that bedevil contemporary American life, a horror movie that will trouble your sleep not with visions of monsters but with a more familiar dread.
  70. The Salesman
    With exquisite patience and attention to detail, Asghar Farhadi, the writer and director, builds a solid and suspenseful plot out of ordinary incidents, and packs it with rich and resonant ideas.
  71. Children Underground
    A singularly depressing film. In the face of such unrelieved, grinding poverty, hope fades.
  72. You Can Count on Me
    Melancholy little gem of a movie.
  73. The Pianist
    Polanski, who was a Jewish child in Krakow when the Germans arrived in September 1939, presents Szpilman's story with bleak, acid humor and with a ruthless objectivity that encompasses both cynicism and compassion.
  74. Dahomey
    Most interestingly, we listen in on young Beninese as they discuss the wider repercussions in an open forum. . . It’s a rich conversation that rapidly lays out the controversies and bigger issues at stake.
  75. Get Out
    Part of what makes Get Out both exciting and genuinely unsettling is how real life keeps asserting itself, scene after scene.
  76. City of Life and Death
    City of Life and Death isn't cathartic: it offers no uplifting moments, just the immodest balm of art. The horrors it represents can be almost too difficult to watch, yet you keep watching because Mr. Lu makes the case that you must.
  77. West Side Story
    It’s a dazzling display of filmmaking craft that also feels raw, unsettled and alive.
  78. California Split
    A fascinating, vivid movie, not quite comparable to any other movie that I can immediately think of. Nor is it easily categorized.
  79. 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.
  80. Amy
    With Amy, Mr. Kapadia isn’t simply revisiting Ms. Winehouse’s life and death, but also — by pulling you in close to her, first pleasantly and then unpleasantly — telling the story of contemporary celebrity and, crucially, fandom’s cost.
  81. Fiume o morte!
    The re-enactment approach may not be as novel as it once was, but it’s still a heady, creative way to excavate layers of buried history in a location that has more than its share.
  82. The Edge of Heaven
    By the end you know the characters in it so well that you can't believe you've seen the movie only once, yet on a second viewing it seems completely new. And that may be because the world they inhabit is immediately recognizable -- until we get to heaven, it's where we live -- and like no place you've been before.
  83. The Savages
    Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages, is a beautifully nuanced tragicomedy about two floundering souls.
  84. Birds of Passage
    Instead of stepping back to explain the beliefs and practices of its main characters, it plunges you into the reality of their lives, trusting that both their humanity and their distinctiveness will be apparent, that they are no more inherently mysterious — or inherently noble — than anyone else.
  85. Ilo Ilo
    This remarkably terse movie doesn’t waste a word or an image. It refuses to linger over each little crisis its characters endure. And its detachment lends a perspective that widens the film’s vision of people reacting to events beyond their control.
  86. An Education
    If in hindsight An Education might make you a little queasy, it is hard to resist, like David himself.
  87. Lebanon
    Lebanon is meticulous, nearly clinical in its attention to what happens in war -- specifically what happened in the first days of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 -- but it is also a palpably and intensely personal film.
    • The New York Times
  88. To the Ends of the Earth
    Kurosawa’s command of film form gives the movie an embracing magnetism despite its seeming thinness of plot.
  89. Ash Is Purest White
    Enthralling.
  90. The Treasure
    The final shot, accompanied by an improbable but perfect musical cue, is an astonishing cinematic gesture, an appalling, hilarious statement about modern values, the state of the world, human nature and everything else. This is a movie that lives up to its name.
  91. The Endurance
    The tale, in any case, is so gripping, so full of improbable turns and agonizing reversals that it bears repeating, and Mr. Butler and Ms. Alexander tell it straightforwardly and well.
  92. Stranger Things
    Something unexpectedly profound emerges from the flimsiest of stories in Stranger Things, a drama so modest and trusting of its two leads that any directing flourishes might have shattered its spell.
  93. Bridegroom
    What Bridegroom celebrates is not simply gay rights; it’s the human spirit.
  94. 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.
  95. I Am Another You
    Ms. Wang delves further into Dylan’s past. If by the end she probably still puts too much trust in Dylan’s aphorisms, give her credit for recognizing the shortcomings of her footage and correcting course.
  96. The Rider
    Ms. Zhao’s commitment to her craft — she knows how to take care and when to take risks — matches Brady’s. She has an eye for landscape and an acute sensitivity to the nuances of storytelling, a bold, exacting vision that makes The Rider exceptional among recent American regional-realist films.
  97. Mali Blues
    Despite the urgency of the situation the musicians face, when they’re not doing their work, the movie is quiet, observant, taking in the austere beauty of the land and the people.
  98. Charm City
    The film captures up close the way violence transforms neighborhoods and families with an immediacy that transcends headlines or sensationalism.
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