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. What If
    A balloon of cuteness that makes you yearn for a pin, What If is Saturday night comfort food for those who need to believe that even the most curdled among us can find a mate.
  2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    A certain kind of discipline and experience is at work here: It’s no accident that the action and dialogue seem blandly cartoonish, as if the moviemakers wanted to keep everything easy for all ages to follow.
  3. About Alex
    The insight that social media fosters false intimacy is old news. The film shows only a half-formed sense of how careers have changed in 30 years.
  4. Deepsea Challenge 3D
    James Cameron upstages the ocean in Deepsea Challenge 3D, a shallow vanity project that invites us to join him in marveling at his own daring.
  5. Fifi Howls from Happiness
    A portrait of the artist as a refusenik, a recluse, a survivor and a stubborn question mark, “Fifi Howls From Happiness” registers, by turns, as a celebration, an excavation and an increasingly urgent rescue mission.
  6. The Hundred-Foot Journey
    The Hundred-Foot Journey is likely neither to pique your appetite nor to sate it, leaving you in a dyspeptic limbo, stuffed with false sentiment and forced whimsy and starved for real delight.
  7. A Fuller Life
    It’s a proud film but average.
  8. The Dog
    The Dog is, as its title suggests, a documentary portrait, but it’s also an exploration of that sometimes messy thing called identity.
  9. Web Junkie
    The film lacks either the immersive intensity that would galvanize emotions or a context that would provide enlightenment. Its brief tour of an unpleasant corner of reality feels less revelatory than voyeuristic.
  10. Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet of Eternity
    The movie is so eager to convince us of Tagore’s greatness as a universal soul (it was Tagore, by the way, who gave Gandhi the name “mahatma,” or great soul) that it fails to give us the man or a clear sense of context.
  11. Louder Than Words
    There’s a way to tell this story that wouldn’t come across as soggy or manipulative. However well intentioned, Louder Than Words doesn’t find that tone.
  12. 4 Minute Mile
    Most of the movie is a losing proposition.
  13. Rich Hill
    Regular hazily scored, gauzy interludes cut into the film’s immediacy and tone. But the filmmakers shade in humble, sympathetic portraits of these children.
  14. Cabin Fever: Patient Zero
    Less methodical and witty than its predecessors, Patient Zero often turns its infected characters into mindless, lurching zombies.
  15. Finding Fela!
    The behind-the-scenes component, juiced with razzle-dazzle excerpts from the “Fela!” production, is sound, in theory. But — like many sequences — it’s not so tightly executed, and this strand tends to knock the documentary off balance.
  16. The Strange Little Cat
    Mr. Zürcher has concocted something intimate yet otherworldly with this highly original debut.
  17. Kick
    A star can lift a movie like Kick, making its silliness sublime. That doesn’t happen here.
  18. The Almost Man
    The Almost Man may be slight, but how many films can pack equal amounts of emotional nuance and inappropriately sprayed urine into just 75 minutes?
  19. Happy Christmas
    More than in any of his previous films, Mr. Swanberg and his cast have refined a seemingly effortless style of semi-improvised storytelling so natural that it barely seems scripted. Life just happens.
  20. Child of God
    What Mr. Franco does have is Mr. Haze, whose mesmerizing performance gives the movie its ballast and its fitful, nervous energy.
  21. Calvary
    The limitations of Calvary are summed up by the insistent, dialectical chatter that almost mechanically pings and pongs between lightness and darkness, glibness and seriousness, insincerity and honesty, faithfulness and despair.
  22. Get On Up
    Like its gyrating, spasmodic staccato beats, Get On Up refuses to stand still. It whirls and does splits and jumps, with leaps around in time and changes in tempo that are jarring and abrupt and that usually feel just right.
  23. Guardians of the Galaxy
    Here, a pulse, wit, beauty and a real sensibility have been slipped into the fray, alongside the clockwork guffaws, kabooms and splats.
  24. Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania
    The film is earnest, formulaic and sentimental. But, like Humpty, it has enough charm to wear down defenses.
  25. Drunktown's Finest
    The screenplay tracing the characters’ struggles has a tidy, workshopped feel, and the dialogue and acting can be gratingly flat. But what gives the film a certain confidence is its cultural specificity and the fresh clashes and contrasts it presents.
  26. Bobby Jasoos
    The exuberant staging and Ms. Balan’s sly performance are the show here.
  27. War Story
    Aiming for a moody portrait of psychological distress, Mark Jackson directs with a sluggish pace, an abstract style and a dismal aesthetic that rebuff involvement.
  28. The Killer Inside Me
    Michael Winterbottom’s nasty and uneven adaptation of Jim Thompson’s surpassingly mean little crime novel.
  29. The Fluffy Movie
    Bringing out truths about fatherhood, love and pride without dissolving into crowd-pleasing, that material feels like the genuine article. Fluffy, not fluff.
  30. Hercules
    As the plot clogs up with foreseeable reversals, wisecrack duties go to Mr. McShane, whose oracular character keeps wrongly predicting his own death. Like Hercules, the movie is plagued by a split identity: It’s half-slog, half-Mel Brooks.
  31. Come Back to Me
    Come Back to Me has seamier goals, employing a quasi-religious conceit to justify its shocks of gore and sexual assault. In that regard, at least, it is grotesquely predictable.
  32. Under the Electric Sky
    This glossy movie from Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz about the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas feels the burden of promotional urges and lacks a sense of immersion in a multistage event attended by hundreds of thousands.
  33. Very Good Girls
    You can only imagine how much stronger the movie might have been had it fleshed out subsidiary dramas whose outlines are barely discernible.
  34. Beneath
    Sparing with scares and judicious with gore, the director, Ben Ketai (working from a screenplay by Patrick J. Doody and Chris Valenziano), proves better at summoning atmosphere than developing characters.
  35. The Kill Team
    Mr. Krauss might have served his material better if he had pulled the curtain back in The Kill Team, if only to explain why a movie that initially seems to be about one thing — as its shocker title suggests — is a partisan portrait of Specialist Winfield and his family.
  36. And So It Goes
    Relatable doesn’t have to mean routine, but Mr. Reiner doesn’t always bother to tell the difference.
  37. Lucy
    Buoyed by Ms. Johansson’s presence, Mr. Besson keeps his entertainment machine purring. He may be a hack, but he’s also a reliable entertainer.
  38. A Most Wanted Man
    Mr. Hoffman’s performance is so finely etched — and the story so irresistible — that the film becomes, almost inescapably, something of a last testament.
  39. Magic in the Moonlight
    Magic in the Moonlight is less a movie than the dutiful recitation of themes and plot points conducted by a squad of costumed actors. The tidy narrative may advance with clockwork precision, but the clock’s most prominent feature is the snooze button.
  40. A Letter to Momo
    Enveloped in a sweetness that buffers the depths of its emotions, Hiroyuki Okiura’s A Letter to Momo explores the stains of loss and regret on a personality too young to articulate them.
  41. A Master Builder
    As both an actor and a playwright, Wallace Shawn, at his most audacious, goes for the jugular, but in sneaky roundabout ways.
  42. Video Games: The Movie
    Unfocused and repetitive, this feature-length commercial by Jeremy Snead uses a muddled timeline and bargain basement graphics to produce a horn-tooting, “Aren’t games awesome?” tone.
  43. Persecuted
    This terrible attempt at a political thriller for the religious right is aimed not at Christians in general but at a certain breed of them, the kind who feel as if the rest of the world were engaged in a giant conspiracy against their interpretation of good and truth.
  44. K Missing Kings
    Despite a generous attempt at a series recap, it’s chaotic for the uninitiated. These characters require several episodes of exposure for us to feel that much is at stake in the ebb and flow of honor, hysteria and eternal friendship. In any case, the animation is often a pure sensual delight.
  45. Fanny
    Mr. Auteuil’s passion project is sincere but not successful, honorable but not alive.
  46. Alive Inside
    Neither the value of music nor the deficiencies of certain nursing homes are tough to debate. But a documentary that never leaves any doubt about what comes next, while single-mindedly stumping for a cause presented as unique, is also not terribly interesting as a film.
  47. A Five Star Life
    Narratively and emotionally, this weirdly becalmed trifle by Maria Sole Tognazzi ends up almost exactly where it started.
  48. Aftermath
    Essentially, we’re watching dead people refuse to lie down, yet the acting isn’t terrible, and Scott Winig’s photography is satisfyingly bleak and grimy.
  49. Planes: Fire & Rescue
    In 3-D, the firefighting scenes are visually striking — with plumes of smoke and chemical dust — though the backgrounds, like other aspects of the film, lack dimension.
  50. Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater
    The graceful flow avoids the spoon-feeding of pocket biographies, and even if the material can feel lean at times, Mr. Klinger shepherds along a valuable encounter with a sense of easy, generally uncanned observation.
  51. Among Ravens
    Among Ravens claws itself to death with sophomoric symbolism.
  52. I Origins
    “Another Earth” was a heartfelt entertainment that managed to infuse a tantalizing science fiction premise with thought and feeling. I Origins is too committed to explaining itself to repeat the trick and falls into the trap of taking its daffy intellectual conceits far too seriously.
  53. Mood Indigo
    More begets more and then too much in Mood Indigo.
  54. The Purge: Anarchy
    Kill or be killed isn’t the official tag line of The Purge: Anarchy, but it fits. It would also make a more suitable title for this satisfyingly creepy, blunt, down-and-dirty thriller, one of those follow-ups that improves on the original.
  55. Wish I Was Here
    Wish I Was Here is so eager to please that you are never allowed to feel uncomfortable for more than a minute or two before a reassuringly stale joke rushes in to pat you on the head.
  56. Sex Tape
    The main reason that Sex Tape, while often quite funny, fails to qualify as a comedy is the absence of any real conflict or complication.
  57. I'm the Same, I'm an Other
    The newer film’s picture of neglect and denial, with flashes of connection and empathy, is promising, if tough to inhabit.
  58. Lost Persons Area
    The filmmaker Caroline Strubbe’s affection for her characters is evident, even through the often oblique narrative.
  59. The Battered Bastards of Baseball
    The Battered Bastards of Baseball is an affectionate scrapbook of a documentary.
  60. Underwater Dreams
    Modest yet meaningful, Underwater Dreams has a political point of view, shining light on underground Americans who deserve recognition.
  61. Road to Paloma
    The film’s loose naturalism and strong acting — Chris Browning, as a liaison between the F.B.I. and the reservation, is especially enjoyable — are slyly seductive.
  62. Rage
    The hand-me-down showiness and sluggish storytelling by the director, Paco Cabezas, underline the monotony in this ordinary revenge thriller.
  63. A Long Way Down
    If there is any humor to be gleaned from this concept, it is nowhere to be found in a movie so shoddily made that there is little continuity between scenes and not a laugh or even a titter.
  64. Honour
    Mr. Khan displays a strong visual sense that makes pivotal scenes pop. The unlikely ending strains credulity, but what this confident debut lacks in subtlety, it more than makes up in execution.
  65. The Empty Hours
    Working with grace and patience, Mr. Fernández makes the mundane captivating.
  66. As It Is in Heaven
    This low-budget debut by Joshua Overbay cooks a surprising amount of tension from the barest minimum of ingredients.
  67. Affluenza
    Straining to find a correlation, even metaphorical, between teenage hedonism and economic collapse, Affluenza never coheres.
  68. Land Ho!
    At times, Colin and Mitch’s trip to Iceland feels like a lark, for them and for the filmmakers. Yet there’s no denying the deepening effect of a movie in which two older men, with their creases and sags, white and thinning hair, inhabit so much screen time.
  69. Boyhood
    In Boyhood, Mr. Linklater’s masterpiece, he both captures moments in time and relinquishes them as he moves from year to year. He isn’t fighting time but embracing it in all its glorious and agonizingly fleeting beauty.
  70. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    “Dawn” is more than a bunch of occasionally thrilling action sequences, emotional gut punches and throwaway jokes arranged in predictable sequence. It is technically impressive and viscerally exciting, for sure, but it also gives you a lot to think, and even to care, about.
  71. Closed Curtain
    On one level, the film (or nonfilm; it was shot on digital video and partly with smartphone cameras) is a mischievous, Pirandellian entertainment. It is also an allegory, dark but not despairing, of the creative spirit under political pressure, and of the ways the imagination can be both a refuge and a place of confinement.
  72. Marius
    It’s not entirely clear what this faithful, slightly creaky new rendering, adapted and directed by the actor Daniel Auteuil, has to offer.
  73. Beyond the Edge
    This absorbing account of the first recorded summit of the world’s highest mountain is a rare documentary for which re-enactments make complete sense.
  74. Wrinkles
    Unfolding in simple yet wonderfully expressive hand-drawn frames, the film’s unsparingly observant plot depicts the slide into senility with empathy and imagination.
  75. Me and You
    [A] small, beautifully made film.
  76. Gabrielle
    If the title role of Gabrielle weren’t so fully embodied by its star, Gabrielle Marion-Rivard, this French Canadian movie about love among the disabled would fall on the condescendingly mushy side of the line between heartwarming and saccharine.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Life Itself
    Life Itself is a work of deftness and delicacy, by turns a film about illness and death, about writing, about cinema and, finally, and very movingly a film about love.
  78. Han Gong-ju
    Swiveling from past to present and back again, the writer and director, Lee Su-jin, drops ominous clues — a bruised boy; a mysterious infection — that only slowly coalesce into a larger tragedy.
  79. Nothing Bad Can Happen
    Pitting good against evil with striking intelligence and a near-operatic commitment to extreme suffering, Ms. Gebbe neither mocks nor celebrates Tore’s love for his God. Neither does she give any hint that it’s reciprocated.
  80. Premature
    Premature bops along with a wiseacre self-awareness and a nimble cast... But Mr. Beers and his fellow screenwriter, Mathew Harawitz, also have a numbing Seth MacFarlane-esque weakness for purely attention-getting crudeness and unfunny stereotypes.
  81. Tammy
    Tammy’s journey, as they like to say in movieland, is into self-worth. Yet the far more interesting trip here, at least until her self-actualization kicks in, is through an America of lousy jobs, tyrannical bosses, nickel-and-diming poverty and real-looking women.
  82. Deliver Us From Evil
    Scott Derrickson, the director, and his special-effects crew really deliver the creepy goods here, providing an apt climax for as taut and credible a movie involving demonic possession as you’re likely to see.
  83. Earth to Echo
    Technology remains no substitute for well-written characters and genuine intrigue and atmosphere, so despite the cute special effects and camera jostling, this film feels like an extended episode of an after-school show by Disney.
  84. Archipelago
    In most movies, something happens; in Archipelago, many things happen, quietly yet meaningfully.
  85. Unrelated
    This is civilized human behavior captured with a clinical precision and accuracy.
  86. Bound by Flesh
    It would be hard not to make a thought-provoking, heartstring-tugging film from this source material, and Bound by Flesh certainly tells the twins’ story effectively.
  87. Siddharth
    Its portrayal of impoverished, careworn people barking at one another and protecting their territory in a daily struggle is bracingly hardheaded.
  88. Radio Free Albemuth
    This lifeless adaptation only proves that making entertaining movies out of hard-to-swallow ideas is as challenging as you might think.
  89. Jackpot
    As an absurdist suspense film, Jackpot mostly hits its marks. As a comedy, it’s less successful, stronger on sight gags than on the detective’s sarcasm.
  90. Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
    Its powerful narratives leaves you with the strong suspicion that the whole story has not yet been told.
  91. They Came Together
    Mr. Wain, who made a delightful comedy with “Role Models” and a cult favorite with “Wet Hot American Summer,” has opted to deliver a series of hit-and-miss sketch-comedy bits rather than a fully realized movie that might have gutted contemporary rom-com clichés rather than just weakly aping them.
  92. The BreakUp Guru
    The humor, when it isn’t overcooked, can be downright insulting or worse.
  93. Postman Pat: The Movie
    Viewers unencumbered by nostalgia will probably see this zippy, occasionally funny movie as no more frantic or pop-culture-addled than the average multiplex fodder.
  94. Snowpiercer
    Though the movie is playfully postmodern in its pastiche of styles and its mingling of sincerity and self-consciousness, there is also something solidly old-fashioned about the way it tells its story.
  95. Begin Again
    Compared with “Once,” Begin Again is a bit like the disappointing, overly produced follow-up to a new band’s breakthrough album.
  96. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    Moving and maddening in almost equal measure, Brian Knappenberger’s The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz is a devastating meditation on what can happen when a prescient thinker challenges corporate interests and the power of the state.
  97. La Bare
    La Bare takes its title from the club it chronicles, a male strip joint in Dallas. The name proves unfortunately apt for a rambling, superficial documentary that straddles the line between exposé and infomercial.
  98. Transformers: Age Of Extinction
    You can admire what he does without really enjoying it, and two hours and 46 minutes of pulverized architecture is a lot to endure. But in every Michael Bay movie there are at least a few moments of inspired, kinetic absurdity.
  99. The Pleasures of Being Out of Step
    This succinct documentary sticks smoothly to its beat.
  100. Yves Saint Laurent
    Mr. Lespert and his screenwriters tend to telegraph what’s happening next with on-the-nose dialogue, leaving behind an orderly but not vividly realized biography (or necessarily a complete one).
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