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. Generation P
    Delivers a brave, head-spinning commentary on the potency of advertising and the seduction of the soul.
  2. Come Sunday
    While Marcus Hinchey’s screenplay is occasionally too blunt, Come Sunday accords sympathetic moments to all its characters — a strategy that gives this chronicle of religious convictions a conviction of its own.
  3. Wild Diamond
    Khebizi brings palpable desperation to the role of Liane, despite the limited script, while the cinematographer Noé Bach intimately frames Liane like we’re intruding on her space.
  4. Soapdish
    Soapdish, directed with good-natured zest by Michael Hoffman, has as serious a split-personality problem as any of its characters, perhaps because its screenplay is the work of Robert Harling (who wrote the story) and Andrew Bergman, two screenwriters with decidedly different comic sensibilities.
  5. The Unknown Girl
    The Unknown Girl is as tense as a police procedural, and as mysterious as a religious parable.
  6. The Phantom of the Open
    A different actor than Rylance might have revealed the slight darker, impostor wrinkles of the tale. Instead, his character, an unflummoxed optimist, shares some of the same cheery qualities as Ted Lasso.
  7. The Hallow
    Mr. Hardy, however, would rather busy himself with reminders of earlier creature features.... Luckily, John Nolan’s old-school effects are wicked good, and Martijn van Broekhuizen’s mossy photography is pleasingly sinister.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    On Moonlight Bay
    Although it strives to develop a genuine nostalgic mood, all that On Moonlight Bay seems to create, sadly enough, is the feeling that this film format is old hat.
  9. The Overnight
    The Overnight ends just as it starts to get interestingly messy, tapping into something real and sweetly touching.
  10. Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.
    Just Another Girl on the IRT means to be instructive about teen-age pregnancies, but what it's saying is none too coherent.
  11. Hanna
    In the end there might not be much to this tale other than titillation, but there's plenty to be said for Ms. Ronan, who was the best thing about "Atonement" and holds her ground against forceful screen presences like Ms. Blanchett and Mr. Bana.
  12. 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.
  13. Pacific Rim
    Pacific Rim, with its carefree blend of silliness and solemnity, is clearly the product of an ingenious and playful pop sensibility.
  14. Night Catches Us
    Ms. Hamilton tells a modest, complex story with admirable clarity and nuance. That her film is so quiet, so evidently invested in contemplation rather than confrontation, gives it power as well as insight.
  15. The Smashing Machine
    Johnson’s performance is the magnetic center of the film, and unless you’re a huge fan of watching this kind of fighting, it’s also the whole reason to watch the movie.
  16. Swallow
    Given how nauseating it is to watch Hunter perform increasingly perilous acts of self-harm in her prison of a mansion, neither the payoff nor the psychology behind her actions makes Swallow an illuminating enough addition to the woman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown genre.
  17. The Warrior
    A minimalist but strikingly beautiful tale of renounced violence told with uncommon precision and depth.
  18. L'Auberge Espagnole
    Presents an appealing and persuasive picture of European integration, in which national differences, which once sparked military and political conflict, are preserved because they make life sexier and more interesting.
  19. We Were Soldiers
    Like the best war movies -- and like martial literature going back to the Iliad -- it balances the dreadful, unassuageable cruelty of warfare and the valor and decency of those who fight.
  20. Unraveled
    Bolstered by animated re-enactments and Bob Richman's frosty cinematography, Unraveled is a mesmerizing one-man dive into narcissism, entitlement and unchecked greed.
  21. Red Flag
    If only Red Flag were funnier and tighter and had a sharper idea about what it means to blur the lines between self-interrogation and self-absorption. As it is, the movie throws off too few sparks.
  22. The Autopsy of Jane Doe
    Gruesome without being gory, The Autopsy of Jane Doe achieves real scares with a minimum of special effects.
  23. Cocoon
    Mr. Howard brings a real sweetness to his subject, as does the film's fine cast of veteran stars; he has also given Cocoon the bright, expansive look of a hot-weather hit. And even when the film begins to falter, as it does in its latter sections, Mr. Howard's touch remains reasonably steady.
  24. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
    The movie, in other words, belongs solidly to Mr. Radcliffe, Mr. Grint and Ms. Watson, who have grown into nimble actors, capable of nuances of feeling that would do their elders proud.
  25. GoldenEye
    Mr. Brosnan, as the best-moussed Bond ever to play baccarat in Monte Carlo, makes the character's latest personality transplant viable (not to mention smashingly photogenic), but the series still suffers the blahs.
  26. The Fantastic Four: First Steps
    To help us buy in, the film mostly relies on the polish of this retro universe and its premium cast (who turn in uneven performances, save for Moss-Bachrach), along with one’s faint familiarity with the iconography of the heroes, to do the legwork. But those pieces sometimes are sufficient to keep this a smooth-enough ride that can even be periodically thrilling.
  27. The Curse of Frankenstein
    This one should be cold-cuts for old-timers who remember Boris Karloff as the get of Frankenstein, but it may tittilate the blissful youngsters.
  28. June Zero
    The shifting story, written by Paltrow and Tom Shoval, complicates the act of commemoration and dwells on the moral quandaries and uncomfortable resonances that result from the events.
  29. 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.
  30. In My Mother's Arms
    In My Mother's Arms takes a distressing snapshot of an ongoing struggle.
  31. Don't Leave Home
    Don’t Leave Home is a frustratingly befuddled movie that’s nevertheless fascinating.
  32. The Aggressives
    In the film's briskly paced 72 minutes, any open-minded viewer will discover something about identity and about the comfort these women have obviously found in learning to be their unusual, unfettered selves.
  33. Leo
    Leo sometimes has trouble identifying its audience.
  34. Aristide and the Endless Revolution
    Nicolas Rossier's cohesive documentary covers this complex incident - and Haiti's deteriorating condition since Mr. Aristide's exile - in a taut, well-balanced 82 minutes.
  35. The Lovers and the Despot
    Despite its flaws and will to kitsch, The Lovers and the Despot has enough enigmas and chills to merit a look, even if some of its spookier moments involve cinephilia rather than the usual weapons of mass destruction.
  36. Ondine
    Mr. Farrell and Mr. Doyle continue to hold your gaze, even as Mr. Jordan's screenplay sets your mind to wandering. There is, as noted, a wisp of a tale tucked into this film, one that, as the story wears on, becomes ponderously weighed down with melodramatic filler and even some halfhearted genre action.
  37. Plus One
    Every minute Erskine isn’t on screen is a minute wasted.
  38. Down in the Valley
    Begins semirealistically, then veers off course, hurtling into the wild blue yonder of myth and allegory. On the way to a climactic shootout that begins on the set of a Hollywood western and ends on a foggy hillside, it makes several screeching, hairpin turns.
  39. Monsieur N.
    If it all adds up to too much for one film to encompass with ease, Monsieur N, is certainly richer than most of what you'll find on the History Channel.
  40. The Year of Living Dangerously
    Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously is a good, romantic melodrama that suffers more than most good, romantic melodramas in not being much better than it is.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mississippi Burning
    For those who know such places, Mr. Parker, who is English, evokes the texture, the gritty, fly-specked Southernness, the brooding sense of small-town menace, the racial hatred, with considerable accuracy.
  42. In a Better World
    Everything about In a Better World feels just a little too easy: a better movie might have let in more of the messiness of the world as it is. This one falls into cheap manipulation, winding up the audience with foreboding music and the spectacle of blond children in peril.
  43. We Are What We Are
    This ghastly scenario of poor preying on poor is, like the film's gray-green palette, profoundly depressing and entirely pitiless.
  44. Bonsái
    There's nothing obscure about young love and loss, and a story, as Mr. Jiménez put it, about "youngsters who have to deal with this sudden lack of certainties which makes them more lonely than they could have ever imagined."
  45. Touch Me Not
    You could say that what the film is about lies just beyond the reach of images or words. It’s a necessarily cerebral meditation on the nature of physicality.
  46. Please Baby Please
    The film’s ironic tone largely defangs the transgressive films it parodies, but Kramer does broaden the scope of the queer leather canon.
  47. Point and Shoot
    [An] incisive, queasy-making documentary.
  48. Agnes
    There is a clear through line of faithlessness in the script by Reece and John Selvidge, but it is otherwise so aimless and underdeveloped as to turn this 93-minute film into a plodding slog.
  49. 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.
  50. Last Breath
    Last Breath is disappointingly shallow and fatally lethargic.
  51. Silkwood
    Silkwood is a very moving work about the raising of the consciousness of one woman of independence, guts and sensitivity.
  52. James' Journey to Jerusalem
    As social criticism -- not only of Israel, but of other affluent countries as well -- James' Journey is both potent and a little didactic.
  53. Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands
    The access to Fassbinder that the relationship provided was a boon to the film, but a disadvantage as well because the close-up view results in a patchy portrait rather than a coherent biography.
  54. Close to Home
    The movie, written and directed by Vidi Bilu and Dalia Hager, is really a study of people coping with excruciating boredom and the absurd aspects of military life.
  55. 100 Nights of Hero
    There’s just enough style and slyness to momentarily whisk one away.
  56. Outrage
    Mr. Dick, whose previous documentaries have examined sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, the inner workings of the movie ratings system and the life and work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, is a cerebral muckraker. While his techniques are not as nakedly tendentious as Michael Moore’s (and his movies, as a consequence, are not as much fun), he hardly pretends to be a detached or unbiased observer.
  57. The Pillow Book
    The film is best watched as a richly sensual stylistic exercise filled with audaciously beautiful imagery, captivating symmetries and brilliantly facile tricks.
  58. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    The film is well organized and visually snazzy and keeps enough distance from its subject that you don't feel swamped in a tide of hysterical fandom.
  59. The Way
    The beauty of the movie, in fact, is that Mr. Estevez does not make explicit what any of them find, beyond friendship. He lets these four fine actors convey that true personal transformations are not announced with fanfare, but happen internally.
  60. The Rover
    There is both too much story and not enough. The contours of this desolate future are lightly sketched rather than fully explained, which is always a good choice. But that minimalism serves as an excuse for an irritating lack of narrative clarity, so that much of what happens seems arbitrary rather than haunting.
  61. Absence of Malice
    Even when the action seems wrongheaded—and it frequently does—the movie is richly textured and well played.
  62. Marie Antoinette
    A thoroughly modern confection, blending insouciance and sophistication, heartfelt longing and self-conscious posing with the guileless self-assurance of a great pop song. What to do for pleasure? Go see this movie, for starters.
  63. Dr T and the Women
    The movie's sexual politics are as contrived as its plot, which veers off into one of the surprise endings of which Mr. Altman is so fond.
  64. About Adam
    Seems refreshing, even mildly subversive.
  65. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
    Too fixated on 1939 for its own good. Its passionate immersion in a past that only dimly resonates with younger audiences may be a badge of its integrity, but that immersion trumps its vision of the future and leaves us in a land of nostalgia.
  66. Napoleon Dynamite
    The performances, even those by trained actors like Mr. Ramirez and Ms. Majorino, have the hesitant, blinking opacity that some directors look for in nonprofessional casts. Their awkwardness is charming, and part of the point of the movie, but it also makes for some dull stretches and thwarts your ability to regard the characters with sympathy rather than mere curiosity.
  67. From the Other Side
    A spare, painterly and scrupulously unsentimental look at the plight of illegal Mexican immigrants massed at the United States border.
  68. Cold Weather
    With no grand speeches or oversized gestures, Mr. Katz creates a specific world that gracefully enlarges with universal meaning.
  69. True Mothers
    Only a mountain couldn’t be moved by True Mothers — but like Asato’s parentage, the sources of that effect are complex. From one angle, True Mothers is sensitive and layered. From another, the tricks it plays with perspective constitute an all-too-calculated ploy for tears.
  70. Suffragette
    Suffragette is an admirably modest movie. It does not quite have the grandeur and force of “Selma,” and the script has a few too many glowingly emotive speeches. The final turns of the tale are suspenseful, but also a bit frantic. But it is also stirring and cleareyed — the best kind of history lesson.
  71. Guilty by Suspicion
    A stirring and tragic evocation of terrible times.
  72. Les Nôtres
    The film’s drama wrestles itself to a standstill (along with leaving some characterization sketchy, like that of a concerned social worker). Yet Leblanc might come closer to the sensation of concealed trauma than movies with more familiar storytelling beats.
  73. Coup de Chance
    Coup de Chance is more sketched-in than satisfyingly detailed. Most of the characters are types, and despite some local color, the story might as well play out in New York, but it’s amusing, technically adept and looks like a professionally made movie (no small thing in the streaming age).
  74. Interview
    Vaporous and chilled to freezing, Interview lacks a single honest moment, but it does have plenty of diverting ones.
  75. Cavite
    A textbook example of seat-of-the-pants guerrilla filmmaking.
  76. Ever Since the World Ended
    Thought-provoking rather than deeply philosophical, Ever Since the World Ended features many engaging performances and several outstanding ones.
  77. Sunflower
    Like Douglas Sirk without the throw pillows, Sunflower is a shamelessly old-fashioned melodrama performed with such sincerity that resistance is futile.
  78. Breath Made Visible: Anna Halprin
    Packed with illuminating interviews and lyrical movement, Breath Made Visible portrays a woman with angels in her feet and innovation in her blood. Long may she rock.
  79. Rachel
    Regrettably, the film, almost devoid of music, is drastically undermined at its end by an inadvertently comic rap tribute by the Kansas City performance artist to the "American citizen with Palestinian blood."
  80. Sample This
    The real pleasure of this film lies in its recognition of session artists and in the oddities and mysteries within the evolution of any given item of pop culture.
  81. Zarafa
    Zarafa may not be the most groundbreaking feat of storytelling, but it does have a giraffe in a balloon.
  82. Assassination
    Assassination has sprinkles of wit and a nicely restrained anchor in Lee Jung-jae.
  83. Unbranded
    What lingers, though, are stirring vistas of the backcountry West, and admiration — for the Aggies’ achievement, Mr. Masters’s imagination and Mr. Baribeau’s skill in chronicling it all.
  84. Sweet Micky for President
    One of the decade’s odder political stories is revisited, without much illumination, in Sweet Micky for President.
  85. Folk Hero & Funny Guy
    Things meander along to the inevitable blowup scene and a too-easy ending in which all is forgiven and personal growth has occurred, though not for the viewing audience.
  86. Where the Day Takes You
    This is Rebel Without a Cause without the grown-ups and without boundaries, transposed to a world of hard drugs, petty crime, hand-to-mouth existence and hopes that somehow will not die.
  87. Digger
    Its terse David and Goliath conflict doesn’t yield satisfyingly punchy results.
  88. The Brides of Dracula
    Here is but another repetition of the standard tale of the vampire bugaboo who likes to sink his oversized dentures into the necks of pretty girls.There is nothing new or imaginative about it.
  89. Sunshine
    A first-rate, seemingly sweat-free entertainer, Mr. Boyle always sells the goods smoothly, along with the chills, the laughs and, somewhat less often, the tears. He’s wickedly good at making you jump and squirm in your seat, which he does often in Sunshine, but he tends to avoid tapping into deep wells of emotion.
  90. Mean Dreams
    Nathan Morlando’s Mean Dreams may use a time-honored premise — young lovers on the lam (see: “Badlands”) — but it does so with such quiet, gently appealing assurance that it makes the template seem fresh again.
  91. South Central
    South-Central plays more like an exploitative potboiler than a civics lesson. Only late in the film, thanks to a sobering of tone and Mr. Plummer's credible performance, does the story develop any real impact.
  92. The Prince of Egypt
    A well-made work with much to recommend it, even if its worthiness is not the brightest flare on the movie horizon this season.
  93. He Got Game
    Basketball, bold urban landscapes, larger-than-life characters and red-hot visual pyrotechnics are the strong points of Mr. Lee's biggest three-ring circus, not to mention the central presence of Denzel Washington.
  94. Runoff
    The movie’s extreme compression is its biggest failing. The business end is so minimally sketched, you are left wanting to know a lot more.
  95. The Muppets Take Manhattan
    This isn't to say that this particular extravaganza, directed by Frank Oz, is in the same super league as The Muppet Movie and The Great Muppet Caper. This may be only an impression, based on the fact that the past always looks greener than the present, but The Muppets Take Manhattan seems just a little less extraordinaire than the two other features. [13 July 1984, p.C10]
    • The New York Times
  96. A Desert
    Lynch is a difficult influence to wield responsibly, yet Erkman keeps it largely under control: A Desert, if at times too ambitious, certainly feels distinct.
  97. Alien: Romulus
    Alien: Romulus is a nuts-and-bolts action-adventure horror story with boos and splatter. It doesn’t have much on its mind but it has some good jump scares along with a disappointingly bland heroine, a sympathetic android and the usual collection of disposable characters who are unduly killed by slavering, rampaging extraterrestrials.
  98. To All the Boys I've Loved Before
    Ms. Johnson directs the picture with an assurance that matches that of her plucky protagonist.
  99. Heaven Help Us
    The director Michael Dinner, making his feature debut, and the screenwriter Charles Purpura have an unusually good feeling for the time, the place, the characters as kids and the adults they later turned into.
  100. Frozen II
    The ensuing adventure is lively, amusing and predictably predictable with revelations, reconciliations and some nebulous politics for the grown-ups. It’s never surprising, yet its bursts of pictorial imagination — snowflakes that streak like shooting stars — keep you engaged, as do Elsa and Anna, who still aren’t waiting for life to happen.
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