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 Bad News Bears in Breaking Training
    Manufactured comedy of a slick order, depending aImost entirely for its effects on the sight and sound of a bunch of kids behaving as if they were small adults. It's a formula that worked for Our Gang Comedy for many years, and works again here with a bright screenplay by Paul Brickman, based on Bill Lancaster's original characters, and direction of intelligent lightness by Michael Presman.
  2. The Great Muppet Caper
    Here is a thoroughly genial movie, a combination of A.A. Milne, Busby Berkeley and a small bit of Blake Edwards.
  3. Sierra Burgess Is a Loser
    There’s sharp dialogue throughout.
  4. State of Grace
    With coolly expressive cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth and an insinuating Ennio Morricone score, State of Grace has a somber and chilling tone that is only occasionally breached.
  5. Constructing Albert
    Sibling rivalry is a consistent subtext but only that — Mr. Adrià’s main concern is to create. As it happens, in this generally likable film he is at his most endearing when fixing himself a simple (but indeed delicious looking) grilled ham and cheese sandwich.
  6. King of Peking
    It’s a charming, breezy father-son story but also a diverting account of Chinese film and video culture in the 1990s.
  7. After Everything
    White and Monroe demonstrate natural chemistry, and they discretely suggest the private experiences of their characters, the youthful doubts that can’t be extinguished by passion. In unpretentious fashion, After Everything portrays the bittersweetness of a first love that blooms in crisis.
  8. Maverick
    Fast, funny, full of straight-ahead action and tongue-in-cheek jokes, Maverick is Lethal Weapon meets Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. That combination won't win any prizes for originality, but it works like a movie mogul's dream and sets the summer-film season off to an unbeatable start.
  9. Bad Reputation
    The movie chronicles music industry tales of glory and failure. These are dishy, but more interesting is Ms. Jett’s rock ‘n’ roll heart. The stories of how she mentored younger bands are moving.
  10. Hal
    It’s a consistently engaging trip. Ms. Scott has assembled a nice, fairly well-rounded group to testify on her subject’s behalf, including people who were part of Ashby’s foundational years in Hollywood — most important, the director Norman Jewison.
  11. Cyrano de Bergerac
    With its screenplay adapted from Rostand by Mr. Rappeneau and Jean-Claude Carriere, the movie is really memorable, though, only for the Depardieu performance, and for the chance it gives us to hear the original French verse.
  12. Good Burger
    When Mr. Mitchell says it, it's hysterically funny. And he's immensely likable.
  13. Nine Months
    Nine Months is slick, phony and uneven, but it's often raucously funny too. And Mr. Grant displays enough intelligence and sportsmanship to emerge from this ordeal as a major Hollywood star.
  14. Science Fair
    Thanks to its lovable subjects, Science Fair nails the presentation, but its research is only surface deep.
  15. 93Queen
    Without denying that these women face discrimination in reaching their goal, the movie shows how its subjects are able to find ways to combine strict observance and progress.
  16. Mid90s
    Like its hero, Mid90s struggles to figure out what it wants to be, and the struggle makes it interesting as well as occasionally frustrating.
  17. The Getaway
    Their appeal as a couple of gorgeous outlaws is the main reason to see this sleek, entertaining remake of Sam Peckinpah's 1972 action film.
  18. Wayne's World 2
    A very good-humored sequel for anyone in tune with its subject.
  19. The Trigger Effect
    Directed with a spare look and exceptional crispness and precision, The Trigger Effect ultimately falls back on the familiar, especially in its banal ideas of how Matt and Annie are changed by their experience. But during the three-day emergency that it describes, this cleverly made film sustains a spooky intensity and an insinuating, utterly confident style.
  20. The Last Race
    Dweck divides his efforts between elegiac tone poem and shaggy-dog ensemble piece.
  21. No Date, No Signature
    A tad overdetermined in its studied, snowballing ambiguities, No Date, No Signature is dramatized with an acute sense of the role of class in Iranian society, and is unfussily well directed, creating visual parallels between the two men.
  22. Stan & Ollie
    Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly deliver dynamite performances that capture the expressions and physicality of the star comedians without ever descending into caricature. They never strain for laughs but are consistently amusing.
  23. 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.
  24. Fathers' Day
    Not surprisingly, there are some slow patches and formulaic touches, but that's a fair trade for the fun of watching Mr. Williams and Mr. Crystal make an irresistible comic team.
  25. The Fourth War
    Mr. Frankenheimer relies on standard touches at times, but he also fills The Fourth War with interesting little asides.
  26. Trick or Treat
    It's genial, not too frightening and even rather sweet.
  27. Sharkwater Extinction
    Stewart recounts how he thought that if his films could make people love these animals, he could push popular opinion against their being hunted. He doesn’t quite pull this off here, despite impressive footage of him swimming with sharks. He does, however, convince us that these superpredators are important to oceanic ecosystems and that because they are so indiscriminate in their eating habits, they are full of toxins.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Earthquake
    For those who have a soft spot for calamity pictures, there's a sense of ritual cleansing afterward. And for some reason, it also made me hungry.
  29. Free Solo
    Despite a somewhat soft middle section, Free Solo is an engaging study of a perfect match between passion and personality.
  30. Star 80
    Make no mistake about it: Miss Hemingway, a beauty who looks a lot like Miss Stratten, is not giving an impersonation but a true performance, as fully realized as the somewhat limited circumstances allow. There is an alertness, humor and intelligence to her work that immediately identifies her as one of our best young film actresses, someone who reinvents character in her own image rather than simply miming it.
  31. Ray & Liz
    Performed with absolute commitment by its cast (Justin Salinger and Ella Smith play the younger versions of the title characters), Ray & Liz is a quietly harrowing movie. Billingham risks tedium, though, in withholding anything like an inner life for any of its characters until the movie’s very end.
  32. C.H.U.D.
    C.H.U.D. makes no pretension toward serious theses about government or the environment. It is meant to be light commercial entertainment, and in the category of horror films it stands as a praiseworthy effort.
  33. Lone Wolf McQuade
    The plot, set in and around El Paso, is unimportant and nonstop, like an old-fashioned, Saturday afternoon serial, which isn't at all bad. Steve Carver, the director, understands that in such films action is content.
  34. Brainstorm
    However adversely it must have affected the morale of those involved in making Brainstorm, the death of Natalie Wood hasn't damaged the film. Her performance feels complete. Playing a more mature character than she had done before, Miss Wood brought hints of a greater sturdiness and depth to this role, which is pivotal but relatively small.
  35. The Rest I Make Up
    Try as it might, sadness still can’t get the best of The Rest I Make Up, a lyrical and lovingly made documentary about the playwright María Irene Fornés, which recalls her career and follows her over several bittersweet years as Alzheimer’s steals her memories.
  36. Kusama - Infinity
    Kusama — Infinity, while conventionally structured, provides ample, illuminating access to an artist’s way of thinking and working.
  37. Serial Mom
    Mr. Waters, of course, no longer traffics in the truly vulgar, as he did in early films like Pink Flamingos. With Serial Mom he concocts a cute suburban satire, a warmly funny movie that even a mother could love.
  38. The Mountain
    Like Alverson’s 2015 character study, “Entertainment,” The Mountain sets forth a profoundly anhedonic vision of America — and humanity — that’s simultaneously upsetting and mesmerizing.
  39. They'll Love Me When I'm Dead
    Neville was inspired by Josh Karp’s engrossing book “Orson Welles’s Last Movie,” which goes into greater detail than Neville can in 98 minutes. Karp also pays closer attention to Welles’s artistic process, which in the documentary can seem little more than pure chaos.
  40. Let's Spend the Night Together
    The classiest of concert movies, even if that sounds as if it ought to be a contradiction in terms. As photographed by Gerald Feil and Caleb Deschanel (of ''The Black Stallion''), it looks glorious, particularly in the opening sequences at an outdoor arena.
  41. Moynihan
    If anything, Moynihan leaves you wanting to watch more of the man. Perhaps too immersed in numbers for politics and too much of a dabbler for academia, he was also a showman — and therefore a natural movie subject.
  42. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
    Informative but not overwhelming, it blends biography and appreciative analysis in 90 brisk, packed minutes.
  43. Chef Flynn
    Chef Flynn is an engaging documentary about McGarry’s boy-to-man journey.
  44. Nelly
    The character Ms. Émond and Ms. Mackay create is not likable, but is puzzling in an engrossing way. I am not sufficiently familiar with Ms. Fortier’s work to weigh in on how accurately this film represents it, but as an act of complex homage, “Nelly” gets to a few interesting places.
  45. Hotel by the River
    Hotel by the River is — surprisingly, from the standpoint of a skeptic — one of Hong’s most unexpectedly poignant works, self-reflexive in a way that feels searching rather than rote.
  46. Too Late to Die Young
    Too Late to Die Young is above all an achievement in mood and implication. Sotomayor has a way of structuring scenes and composing images that makes everything perfectly clear but not obvious.
  47. Walking on Water
    We spy on an artist who races around like a mad scientist, and who seems comically befuddled by technology. His passion is genuine, as is his sense of wonder.
  48. The Great Buster: A Celebration
    The film presents a compact, tactful biography and also a valuable explication of the Keatonesque in its most sublime varieties. Coming ahead of a digital restoration of Keaton’s major films, it serves as both a primer and refresher, as well as a promise that he will not be forgotten.
  49. The Trouble with Harry
    It is not a particularly witty or clever script that John Michael Hayes has put together from a novel by Jack Trevor Story, nor does Mr. Hitchcock's direction make it spin. The pace is leisurely, almost sluggish, and the humor frequently is strained. But it does possess mild and mellow merriment all along the way.
  50. Reversing Roe
    It’s less interested in rendering a verdict on the morality of abortion than it is in tracing the increasing politicization of the issue.
  51. J.T. Leroy
    Anchored by its two excellent leads, the movie is sympathetic and, for the most part, unsentimental.
  52. Starting Over
    Starting Over depicts an abandoned man in all his misery, and still manages to be fast and funny while it breaks new ground.
  53. Breathless
    Breathless has a lot of mindless drive, but it's also funny. It's full of knowing quotes from other movies and from literature - William Faulkner in addition to Marvel Comics. It's less a film maker's journey of discovery than the film maker's testimony to his awareness of ''cinema,'' and sometimes it's just too much.
  54. Best Friends
    Even when Best Friends isn't working uproariously as a comedy, there's an element of original, offbeat humor that keeps it promising.
  55. Black '47
    Since this is a rare feature film to treat the Irish famine, it’s a little odd that it tilts so heavily toward a genre exercise. But as a genre exercise, it’s pretty potent.
  56. All Square
    Hyams directs Timothy Brady’s script appropriately if not brilliantly (Hyams is also credited as a co-editor), but the movie’s main attraction, finally, is its cast.
  57. Psycho III
    Unlike most sequels, which seem to get bigger, fancier and emptier the further removed they are from their source material, Psycho III has a lean, serviceable, stripped-down quality to it.
  58. Above and Beyond: NASA's Journey To Tomorrow
    This is not a spectacular picture, but it’s an informative and heartening one that might make a good double feature with “First Man,” the forthcoming fictionalized blockbuster about Apollo 11.
  59. The Curse of La Llorona
    The scares are plentiful and sometimes ticklishly funny in The Curse of La Llorona, an enjoyably old-fashioned ghost story.
  60. Tito and the Birds
    The adventure plot in the Brazilian feature Tito and the Birds, directed by Gustavo Steinberg, Gabriel Bitar, and André Catoto, is no great shakes — it wouldn’t be out of place on a Saturday-morning cartoon — but visually, the movie leaves room for the viewer to synthesize, and to dream.
  61. The Price of Everything
    While this colorful and inquisitive cinematic essay on the state of the art world is occasionally skeptical and consistently thoughtful, cynicism isn’t really on its agenda.
  62. Mother
    Brooks brings vast reserves of quarrelsome, hairsplitting hilarity to the story of a man going mano a mano with his sweet little mom.
  63. The Commitments
    Mr. Parker immerses his audience in a world in which popular art amounts to a communal high, a means of achieving identity and a great escape from the abundant problems of everyday life. As in Fame, he does this with a mixture of annoying glibness and undeniable high-voltage style. [14 Aug 1991, p.C11]
    • The New York Times
  64. The Last Resort
    The cultural transformation and re-transformation of Miami Beach (specifically its southern tip, South Beach) is a story that’s fascinating, poignant, garish and, in some ways, befuddling.
  65. They Shall Not Grow Old
    Peter Jackson has taken a mass of World War I archival clips from Britain’s Imperial War Museum and fashioned it into a brisk, absorbing and moving experience.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
    The credits outweigh the debits and Mr. Disney has included enough elements of entertainment to make his newest film package a solid entertainment.
  67. Daughters of the Sexual Revolution: The Untold Story of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders
    The tone is unabashedly partial, yet the women are such entertaining company it’s hard to mind.
  68. Continental Divide
    Mr. Apted has made this a sweet, engaging movie that audiences will very much want to see end well.
  69. True Stories
    True Stories may well appeal more to those who don't know much about Mr. Byrne's music career than those who do. The soundtrack songs have the catchy simplicity of Talking Heads' most recent and least demanding compositions. And the film's imagery, expertly captured in bold, bright colors by Ed Lachman, will be even more striking to those who find it novel.
  70. Alice in Wonderland
    If you are not too particular about the images of Carroll and Tenniel, if you are high on Disney whimsey and if you'll take a somewhat slow, uneven pace, you should find this picture entertaining.
  71. Narcissister Organ Player
    Narcissister’s background in stagecraft, movement and rhythm serves her well as a filmmaker: Far from a conventional autobiography, Narcissister Organ Player always offers something to catch your eye or ear.
  72. Bob Roberts
    A very funny, sometimes prescient satire of American politics, and of the comparatively small, voting portion of the electorate that makes a Bob Roberts phenomenon possible.
  73. The Jungle Book
    If this version of The Jungle Book makes for a fable that is thinner than it might have been, the film is splendidly picturesque and moves along briskly.
  74. Never Look Away
    Never Look Away bristles with half-formed thoughts and almost-heady insights, and hums with an ambition that is exasperating and exhilarating in equal measure.
  75. DriverX
    This is not a perfect film, and features maybe one wild night too many. But its outlook — optimistic about human nature yet cynical about the times — lingers.
  76. Dave
    In spite of this sogginess, and despite a self-congratulatory, do-gooder streak that the film discovers within Dave, this comedy remains bright and buoyant much of the way through.
  77. Martyr
    The more time Khaled’s camera takes to wend its way around Hassane’s suspended body, the more its caresses seem to match all the embracing and caressing Hassane’s friend does. And the more time the movie devotes to the parts of this one man’s body the more that care seems to stand in for a country’s neglected whole.
  78. The Vanishing
    While Jorgen Johansson’s windswept photography creates a credible sense of isolation (he filmed in part at the Mull of Galloway lighthouse), we sense the ominous rhythms of impending calamity.
  79. The Mustang
    The Mustang is direct and almost perilously familiar — it draws from both westerns and prison movies — yet it is also attractively filigreed with surprising faces, unusual genre notes and luminous, evanescent beauty.
  80. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    Where’s My Roy Cohn?” is most interesting for the questions it doesn’t explicitly ask. Those have to do with not with Cohn’s blatant amorality, but with the moral compromises of the elite who tolerated his company and found uses for his talents.
  81. Brian's Song
    The film's only concession to contemporary cinematography was in the cliché of lyrical slow motion, with extended sequences of the two football players, one white and the other black, running together through sylvan glades. More than that, though, the basic story is moving.
  82. Troop Zero
    What Troop Zero lacks in complexity, it makes up for in heart.
  83. Photograph
    If the story is familiar, the storytelling can be immersive — Batra shades in the leads and their worlds with a human specificity that makes Photograph compelling in a slice-of-life way, particularly regarding class in India.
  84. Radioactive
    Radioactive, a thoughtful, very watchable fictionalized portrait of Marie Curie, tries hard to nudge the halo off its subject. Given her endeavors and accolades — including two Nobel Prizes — this simple, humanizing effort proves tough but also feels necessary.
  85. Alice Sweet Alice
    Mr. Sole, whose first feature this is, knows how to direct actors, how to manipulate suspense and when to shift gears: the identity of the killer is revealed at just that point when the audience is about to make the identification, after which the film becomes less of a horror film than an exercise in suspense.
  86. Tightrope
    A suspenseful, involving detective drama with one of the screen's most durable tough-guy heroes, doing what he does best and still managing to show something new.
  87. All Is True
    While All Is True might not brim with excitement, it’s beautifully acted, richly photographed (by Zac Nicholson) and blessedly free of histrionics. Between them, Branagh and Elton have concocted a respectful story of loss, regret and wistful genius.
  88. F.I.S.T.
    F.I.S.T. is a big movie that benefits more from the accumulation of small, ordinary detail than from any particular wit or inspiration of vision. It's also played with great conviction by its huge cast.
  89. Deadly Blessing
    A better-than-average horror film, in large part because it isn't about terrified coeds being stalked by an ax wielding loon. Its story is more original than that -although where horror-movie ingenuity is concerned, it's only a thin line that separates the original from the bizarre.
  90. Car Wash
    A cheerful, somewhat vulgar, very cleverly executed comedy about what goes on in a single 10-hour period in a Los Angeles car wash.
  91. The Living End
    Doing himself a great disservice, the writer and director Gregg Araki labels his work "an irresponsible movie" when in fact it has the power of honesty and originality, as well as the weight of legitimate frustration. Miraculously, it also has a buoyant, mischievous spirit that transcends any hint of gloom.
  92. Totally F***ed Up
    This feisty, disjointed film finds something compelling in its characters even when they're so druggy they can barely stand.
  93. Firstborn
    It is to the credit of Mr. Apted, and to a cast including some very believable young actors, that Firstborn moves swiftly and smoothly enough to dispel much nitpicking about plot points, at least for a time.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Newly Single
    An examination of the unconscious racial bias embedded in Izzy and Astor’s interactions would have made for a more revelatory take on relationship dysfunctions. Still, Izzy’s despair and self-loathing force Astor to confront his own, redeeming an often insufferable protagonist and ultimately salvaging the film.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jeremiah Johnson
    There are momoments of great beauty and terror and deeply earned pathos. There are as well such not-so-incidental pleasures as John Rubinstein's lovely and serviceable musical score, and a cast of excellent supporting actors.
  96. Fyre
    Fyre needs another layer. You can locate in it this national moment of brashness and effrontery.
  97. House
    It has a style that is unexpectedly snappy. Scares are not its strong suit, but it has a trim, bright look and better performances than might be expected. William Katt, looking weathered and sounding very Robert Redfordlike as Roger Cobb, brings some conviction to his role, and George Wendt is funny as a nosy next-door neighbor named Harold.
  98. Outland
    Outland is what most people mean when they talk about good escapist entertainment. It won't enlarge one's perceptions of life by a single millimeter, but neither does it make one feel like an idiot for enjoying it so much.
  99. Strange Days
    Only when it comes time to justify its excesses and deliver on a promise of wider revelation does the otherwise audacious screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks look too specific and small.
  100. The Changeover
    Thanks to fine performances and a narrative that doesn’t hang about to admire itself, the movie goes down as easily as a love potion at a coven.
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