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. Humshakals
    During its 159 minutes, this movie bombards you with eager-to-please but clueless shtick.
  2. Fonzy
    What distinguishes Fonzy is its attention to Diego’s Galician roots. As his character discovers his offspring and his paternal instinct, Mr. Garcia gives the bedraggled but compassionate Diego an aspect slightly more emphatic than his screen forebears.
  3. Miss Lovely
    Though not pretentious, his film feels a tad overthought, held back somehow by a stubborn, dour obscurity clouding its freshly realized, lurid milieu.
  4. Code Black
    Slicing through the fat of policy debates to the visceral rush of critical care, the narrative combines existential worries... and blood-and-guts immediacy with a seamlessness that made me want to high-five the editor, Joshua Altman.
  5. A Picture of You
    Mr. Chan’s skill with actors — particularly with Ms. Mei and Mr. Pang’s persuasive, easygoing banter — compensates for the story’s limitations.
  6. Le Chef
    For a film about mouthwatering cuisine, it offers only fleeting delectable sensations.
  7. No Tears for the Dead
    This is the kind of sleek, precisely constructed genre work that’s gone missing from American summer movies.
  8. Coherence
    At some point, though, Mr. Byrkit turns one too many corners (characters, meanwhile, begin bustling in and out of rooms like Marx Brothers extras), and what began as a nifty puzzle feels more like a trap.
  9. Exhibition
    Exhibition is an exquisitely photographed film that requires unusually close attention for it to reveal itself.
  10. Norte, the End of History
    It is the work of a director as fascinated by decency as by ugliness, and able to present the chaos of life in a series of pictures that are at once luminously clear and endlessly mysterious.
  11. The Last Sentence
    Although its black-and-white visuals catch the eye, The Last Sentence soon loosens its hold on your attention by flooding the story with mind-numbing, uninteresting details while real history slips through the cracks.
  12. Think Like a Man Too
    Things turn loud and desperate and stay that way.
  13. A Summer's Tale
    A Summer’s Tale has room to focus on Rohmer’s brilliance at revealing human nature through articulate, multidimensional characters, perfectly cast, who in some ways seem to exist outside of time.
  14. Venus in Fur
    What is beyond dispute is the sheer exuberant virtuosity Ms. Seigner and Mr. Amalric bring to the material.
  15. Third Person
    The storytelling is infuriatingly coy, as if Mr. Haggis were trying to fool you (and himself) into thinking that he has something to say. Third Person finds Mr. Haggis, like Mr. Neeson’s screen alter ego, running on empty.
  16. Jersey Boys
    Jersey Boys is a strange movie, and it’s a Clint Eastwood enterprise, both reasons to see it.
  17. Holiday
    The action sequences mostly have tension and punch, even if the movie is old-school long — 2 hours 41 minutes — and the plot doesn’t bear too much scrutiny.
  18. Northern Light
    There’s a stillness to the filmmaking, coupled with Saunder Jurriaans and David Bensi’s truly lovely original score, that lends specific shots... a near-heartbreaking melancholy.
  19. I Am I
    The film, financed by a Kickstarter campaign, looks polished enough. But its investors’ money might have been better spent elsewhere.
  20. Ivory Tower
    Ivory Tower, a documentary about soaring costs and other problems confronting higher education, can’t seem to decide what points it wants to make and ends up making none.
  21. The Signal
    William Eubank’s The Signal demonstrates the fine line between paranoid science-fiction fantasy and demo reel.
  22. The Amazing Catfish
    If there’s a certain depth missing in The Amazing Catfish, the film brings forth the small-scale pleasures and poignancy of an ambling short story.
  23. All Cheerleaders Die
    Shot with a camera as excited as a squirrel-chasing dog, Cheerleaders has a girls-gone-wild energy and a twisted sense of humor.
  24. A Coffee In Berlin
    If A Coffee in Berlin has its own kind of formula and a romanticism that reads as both youthful and obscuring, it nevertheless absorbs you and makes you wonder what Mr. Gerster will do next.
  25. Manuscripts Don't Burn
    Its violence is low-tech... and its look is old-school, but its message could not possibly be more momentous.
  26. Witching and Bitching
    Known for his genre pastiches, the director, Álex de la Iglesia (“El Crimen Perfecto”), rarely lets the pace flag, and the buddy comedy, gross-out humor and horror elements make for a harmonious mix.
  27. Lullaby
    Lullaby, the directorial debut of Andrew Levitas, a jack of all artistic trades, is the kind of manipulative, cliché-infested hokum that alienates moviegoers by its insistence on hogging all the tears.
  28. Heli
    Heli, which won the directing prize in Cannes last year, is at once extreme and unspectacular, a grisly and lurid slice-of-life drama.
  29. Test
    As Frankie, Mr. Marlowe delivers a quiet, moving performance of such subtlety and truthfulness that you almost feel that you are living his life.
  30. Evergreen: The Road to Legalization
    This record of Washington State’s battle over Initiative 502, which legalized possession of small amounts of recreational marijuana in 2012, is predictably loaded with rancor. The battle isn’t over whether pot should be legalized, but to what extent.
  31. Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face
    Charmingly slight and casually confessional.
  32. Hellion
    Writer and director Kat Candler struggles to shape an undercooked story into compelling drama.
  33. Policeman
    In Policeman, Mr. Lapid, making an electrifying feature directing debut, traces the line between the group and the individual in a story that can be read as a commentary on the world as much as on Israel.
  34. Violette
    [A] handsome, intelligently absorbing and stirring biographical portrait.
  35. 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.
  36. Where We Started
    Written and directed by Chris Hansen, this romance has its authentic moments. As it happens, Mr. Brumlow and Ms. Vander Broek are married, but their familiarity hurts as much as it helps.
  37. Breakthrough Weekend
    This New York shaggy-dog story from Sujewa Ekanayake is an example of extreme-makeshift filmmaking — but not, unfortunately, a successful one.
  38. 22 Jump Street
    More is more and is, at times, just right in 22 Jump Street, an exploding piñata of gags, pratfalls, winking asides, throwaway one-liners and self-reflexive waggery.
  39. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    Dragon 2 is considerably darker and more self-aware than its forerunner. Both films are speedier than the average animated blockbuster. In places, Dragon 2 is almost too fast to keep up with, and, in other places, it’s a little too dark, at least in 3-D.
  40. Burning Bush
    Ms. Holland, working from a script by Stepan Hulik, a Czech screenwriter born in 1984, turns a sprawling story into a tight and suspenseful ethical thriller.
  41. This Is Not a Ball
    The journey, an exploration of the passion for soccer that evolves into a history of the ball (a sort of film version of the anthropologist John Fox’s 2012 book, “The Ball”), is somewhat illuminating, often indulgent and never wholly satisfying.
  42. Filmistaan
    Teetering somewhere between audacious and offensive, the stylistically voracious Filmistaan only intermittently reveals any sense of danger in its comedy.
  43. Rigor Mortis
    Applying ghoulish special effects and atmospheric slow pacing, the film also maintains a dark palette of blacks, browns and ash grays, the better to serve as a backdrop when the blood starts spattering.
  44. Small Small Thing
    There is no gore here, and no on-screen violence, but this is in every way a horror movie. With a devastating ending.
  45. Burning Blue
    The script, by Mr. Greer and Helene Kvale, rolls along with lifeless, profoundly unimaginative dialogue.
  46. The Moment
    Disorientation is a double-edged sword, especially when the ostensible reorientation is as unsatisfying as it is here.
  47. Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago
    As travelogue, this is a persuasive introduction.
  48. Burt's Buzz
    The film, by Jody Shapiro, seems so hagiographic that when it finally gets around to its 20 minutes’ worth of interesting stuff, you’re not sure whether to trust it.
  49. Dormant Beauty
    If Dormant Beauty does not rank among Mr. Bellocchio’s best movies, it nonetheless still occasionally shows him at his best. His eye for the latent beauty and evident absurdity of Italian life remains acute, as does his appreciation for vivid performance.
  50. Master of the Universe
    Mr. Voss’s metaphors pile up helplessly: Finance is like being in the army, like catching a virus and as hard to grasp as quantum particles. The film in which he appears is a vertiginous look inside the bubble behind the financial bubble, with no end in sight.
  51. The Only Real Game
    The history lesson is fascinating, and it’s nice to see an American export other than a Hollywood blockbuster engendering good will.
  52. The Case Against 8
    The Case Against 8 functions as a valuable record of the nuts-and-bolts conference room side of advocacy — an aspect of civil rights work not often seen on screen.
  53. 2 Autumns, 3 Winters
    The wistful, overarching theme is the passing of time in the lives of young adults, aware of growing older, who seek to ground themselves in relationships and work, but relationships most of all. The movie reminds you with a series of gentle nudges that whether you want it to or not, the future happens.
  54. The Sacrament
    Mr. West sets the scene reasonably well, ratcheting up a sense of unease with old-fashioned shadows and some nighttime scrambling, but he gets lost once he shifts from fooling around in the dark to recreating mass death.
  55. Willow Creek
    Mr. Goldthwait exercises so much caution that you want to get behind his characters and push.
  56. Trust Me
    As the movie picks up speed and undergoes sudden, confusing plot reversals, it loses its satirical edge.
  57. Ping Pong Summer
    This gentle comedy, while entirely unmemorable, releases a genuine warmth that deflects harsh judgment. It doesn’t, however, excuse characters that are little more than props for embarrassing fashion or delivery systems for dated slang.
  58. Borgman
    That Borgman restrains itself from turning into a full-scale horror movie makes it all the more unsettling, although it has its bumpy moments.
  59. Obvious Child
    It’s both funny and serious without trying too hard to be either, and by trying above all to be honest.
  60. Citizen Koch
    It’s a hodgepodge that Michael Moore (whose movies Ms. Lessin and Mr. Deal have produced) and his editors might snappily dice together, but here the construction falls short.
  61. Edge of Tomorrow
    In Edge of Tomorrow, Mr. Liman brings Mr. Cruise’s smile out of semiretirement and also gives him the kind of physical challenges at which he so brilliantly excels.
  62. Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon
    Mr. Gordon is likable, though it would be naïve to think he is unaware of cultivating his own image here.
  63. The Fault in Our Stars
    Though it is a tragic love story, it is also a perfect and irresistible fantasy.
  64. Emoticon
    With its underwritten characters (especially Walter) and scenes, it seems like a generic ABC Family plotline melded to a commercial for Facebook, Twitter and Skype.
  65. The Hornet's Nest
    The Hornet’s Nest lets its soldiers do most of the talking. The action — the rapid fire of automatic weapons, the crack of a sniper’s shot, the medevac rescues — is vivid.
  66. Lucky Them
    While Ms. Collette grounds Ellie and her emotions in a tough-minded plausibility, she can only hint at what the script fails to deliver: the complexities of a flawed woman’s midlife crisis.
  67. Korengal
    The sequel is much more than a collection of outtakes from the first film, augmented by footage shot later.
  68. Before You Know It
    There’s much sympathy but little tension in P J Raval’s new documentary.
  69. The Grand Seduction
    It’s adorable.
  70. Filth
    After a certain point, watching it is like listening to the ravings of an increasingly incoherent and abusive drunk.
  71. Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas
    The severely beautiful film is painted in a dauntingly austere manner, as if lost in a war against itself, with confrontations underplayed and the rural landscapes making more of an impression than the detoured drama.
  72. Elena
    With its free-floating imagery, Elena unfolds like a cinematic dream whose central image is water, which symbolizes the washing away of grief. But more than that, it represents the stream of life, with beautiful images of women floating through time.
  73. Night Moves
    Some of the climactic turns seem to follow the kind of narrative rules that this film, and this filmmaker, have otherwise defied.
  74. Maleficent
    Consciously or not, coherently or not, Maleficent tells a new kind of story about how we live now, not once upon another time. And it does so by suggesting, among other things, that budding girls and older women are not natural foes, even if that’s what fairy tales, Hollywood and the world like to tell us.
  75. We Are the Best!
    There is hardly a shortage of movies about rock ’n’ roll, but there are few as perfect — which is to say as ragged, as silly, as touching or as true — as We Are the Best!.
  76. A Million Ways to Die in the West
    A Million Ways to Die in the West seems serious about only one thing: its contempt for the gun-crazed macho ethos exalted in countless Hollywood westerns. You might call the movie “Revenge of the Übernerd.”
  77. Gebo and the Shadow
    Mr. Oliveira relishes the formality of conversation, and there is great pleasure to be found in listening to the actors and watching the small adjustments of posture and gesture that accompany their words.
  78. The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne
    The Life & Crimes of Doris Payne has an embarrassment of riches in Ms. Payne’s story, and it’s often a ripping good yarn, but, as a film, it lacks the nimbleness and resourcefulness of its subject.
  79. Grand Départ
    Although the subject is potent, the film, directed with a seemingly effortless commercial acumen, doesn’t burrow deeply.
  80. Wolf
    The movie’s grittiness — the director, Jim Taihuttu (“Rabat”), shoots Wolf in black and white — its intrigues, its graphic violence and Mr. Kenzari’s performance make for a worthy addition to the annals of gangster films, Interpol edition.
  81. A World Not Ours
    Mr. Fleifel helps walk us through the history with an ingratiating voice-over that lightens the seemingly permanent clouds of a dire history.
  82. Frequencies
    While the detached, deadpan tone and occasionally stilted acting might leave some viewers flat, there’s no doubting the fierce intelligence behind this admirable puzzle box of a movie.
  83. Lila Lila
    The actors — the deft Mr. Brühl and the charming Ms. Herzsprung — add what levity they can.
  84. The Love Punch
    Some wonderful actors add class to the material, which struggles to find a consistent register of cartoonishness.
  85. The Angriest Man in Brooklyn
    The movie is predictably sentimental at its root, but it’s also meant to be comedy, partly resting on Mr. Williams’s energetic but failed attempt to play a jerk.
  86. The Fatal Encounter
    For all its spectacle, The Fatal Encounter is wanting for profundity.
  87. Blended
    Most of Blended has the look and pacing of a three-camera sitcom filmed by a bunch of eighth graders and conceived by their less bright classmates. Shots don’t match. Jokes misfire. Gags that are visible from a mile away fail to deliver.
  88. Cold in July
    As the movie’s resident live wire, Mr. Johnson, obviously having the time of his life, is a hoot, and the feisty camaraderie among these three men gives Cold in July a euphoric goofiness.
  89. X-Men: Days of Future Past
    As usual, the characters — and the performers playing them — step unto the breach to provide just enough wit and feeling to make Days of Future Past something other than a waste of a reasonable person’s time.
  90. Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
    A small miracle of a film.
  91. Words and Pictures
    Words and Pictures has a host of flaws, but the performances by Mr. Owen and Ms. Binoche have a crackling vitality, and the screenplay’s strongest moments set off the kind of trains of thought that dedicated teachers hope to spur in their students.
  92. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
    Heavily seasoned with epigrams worthy of Oscar Wilde, this entertaining documentary portrays Vidal as a pessimistic political prophet with streaks of paranoia and misanthropy, but a truth teller nonetheless.
  93. The Dance of Reality
    The Dance of Reality is the work of a highly disciplined anarchist, whose principal weapon against authority is his own imagination.
  94. Cyber-Seniors
    This is a sweet tale that will resonate with anyone who has tried to make a Skype call to a grandparent.
  95. Don Peyote
    A bit too true to a frugal indie philosophy, where winging it beats reshooting, the film gets more woolly and unfocused; many scenes feel improvised and only occasionally hit their marks.
  96. Chinese Puzzle
    This warm-blooded paean to globalization is just enough in touch with reality to keep your eyes from rolling. For Chinese Puzzle genuinely likes people. It overlooks the faults and misbehavior of its eccentric characters to express a lighthearted optimism that doesn’t feel forced or manipulative. It is in love with life.
  97. Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case
    Mr. Johnsen offers viewers the challenge and pleasure of an important artist’s company, and a chance to appreciate anew his wisdom, his wit and his bravery.
  98. The American Nurse
    If the film is workmanlike at times, it is also elegantly cleareyed.
  99. The Discoverers
    Mr. Schwarz falters with his ending, which feels overly tidy. Still, it’s not the destination; it’s the journey.
  100. Half of a Yellow Sun
    Half of a Yellow Sun, adapted from the 2006 novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, emerges on screen as a well-acted, finely wrought epic that nevertheless struggles to balance the requirements of melodrama with its drive to capture a historical moment.
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