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. A Night in Old Mexico
    The director Emilio Aragón wisely trains the camera on Mr. Duvall. A Night in Old Mexico is his baby, and he rocks it.
  2. A Short History of Decay
    Despite Mr. Maren’s own ample experience as a writer, the references to book culture don’t feel vivid enough to act as more than scene-setting, and the film’s strength lies in the family relationships.
  3. Cold Bloom
    Cold Bloom, in its tightly controlled moods, comes to feel like a smaller and more tentative film than it might have been, despite an admirably frank ending.
  4. A People Uncounted
    Much of this movie is composed of survivors who give harrowing accounts of their experiences, and their warnings about rising ethnic hatred in Europe should not be ignored. But those seeking to learn in depth about, say, the dialects and traditions of the Roma should look elsewhere.
  5. Next Year Jerusalem
    What elevates the film beyond a video scrapbook, though, are the glimpses of the routines and slow rhythms of the nursing home before and after this adventure.
  6. Wolf Creek 2
    Even more inadvisable was the decision (whether made by Mr. McLean or his backers) to transform the mercurial psychopath Mick Taylor (a truly menacing John Jarratt) into a roguish cartoon.
  7. Hanna Ranch
    Like many tragic visionaries, Kirk Hanna lives on through his ideas long after his death.
  8. The Immigrant
    The film is earnestly and unabashedly melodramatic to an extent that may baffle audiences accustomed to clever, knowing historical fictions. But it also has a depth and purity of feeling that makes other movies feel timid and small by comparison.
  9. Million Dollar Arm
    Every conflict is softened by inspirational clichés.
  10. Godzilla
    It is at once bloated and efficient, executed with tremendous discipline and intelligence and conceived with not too much of either.
  11. American Jesus
    It’s not clear what Aram Garriga thinks he is accomplishing in his simplistic “American Jesus,” but he’s not accomplishing much.
  12. Horses of God
    In its demystification of these youthful slum dwellers, the film makes their embrace of terrorism frighteningly comprehensible. Because it follows its main characters over 10 years, from childhood into adulthood, it gives their fates a sense of tragic inevitability
  13. Still I Strive
    The innovative fictional narrative, woven throughout, demonstrates that many of these young actors have learned their lessons well.
  14. The Rescuers
    While the documentary marshals an impressive array of survivors and visits several international locations, it grindingly adheres to an unwieldy tour-style presentation, with more than a few rough spots and, at times, an unpolished look.
  15. Stage Fright
    It’s inspired enough to draw attention to ways that it doesn’t realize its potential.
  16. God's Pocket
    As this strained, foul-mouthed exercise in gallows humor proceeds, God’s Pocket sustains a facade of meanspirited deadpan comedy. But there are no laughs, not even smirks to be had.
  17. Moms' Night Out
    Little of it is funny or genuine, and the benefits and beauty of real faith are nowhere in evidence.
  18. Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
    All in all, the beloved kingdom of Oz is not well served, though there’s just enough detectable affection to keep it from feeling like a pure cashing-in.
  19. Chapman
    The more Chapman reveals, the less seems to be going on, and the more its quirkier developments... play like independent-film clichés.
  20. DamNation
    If the film is less persuasive for its lack of balance, it’s at least heartening to learn that undesirable dams can be destroyed and their rivers restored to their old ways and means.
  21. Farmland
    Smooth and folksy, it traffics in broad, unchallenged claims that serve a single purpose: to persuade us that the only thing wrong with today’s farming methods is our misinformed perception of them.
  22. Devil's Knot
    In the opening images of Devil’s Knot, the camera sets a menacing, Hitchcockian mood by stealthily creeping into the woods where the murders took place. But the movie settles into being a police procedural with the tone of a superior episode of “Law & Order: SVU.”
  23. Fed Up
    A whirlwind of talking heads, found footage, scary statistics and cartoonish graphics, the movie is a fast, coolly incensed investigation into why people are getting fatter.
  24. The Double
    It never quite rises to the full potential of its theme or fully inhabits its intricately imagined space. It’s cool but not haunting — a brainteaser rather than a mindblower.
  25. Palo Alto
    What tethers the movie and especially April and Teddy is how Ms. Coppola captures that exquisitely tender, moving moment between fragile, self-interested youth and tentatively more outwardly aware adulthood, a coming into consciousness that she expresses through their broken sentences, diverted glances and abrupt turns.
  26. Chef
    [A] shallow but enjoyable all-American morality play.
  27. Neighbors
    Neighbors is not a great film and does not really aspire to be. It is more a status report on mainstream American movie comedy, operating in a sweet spot between the friendly and the nasty, and not straining to be daring, obnoxious or even especially original. It knows how to have fun. How very grown-up.
  28. Sol LeWitt
    The on-camera absence of its subject and its overall indifference to matters of biography make Sol LeWitt a welcome departure from most documentaries about artists, as well as a fitting and serious tribute to his art.
  29. Llyn Foulkes One Man Band
    The filmmakers are blessed and cursed with a subject who seems to lack the usual filters. We in turn witness Mr. Foulkes in action, at length — revamping his works, railing against the art world and speaking his neurotic mind.
  30. Breastmilk
    Empathetic and nosy, Ms. Ben-Ari is no unequivocal cheerleader for breast over bottle: If anything, her subjects’ time-consuming struggles and evident exhaustion could put a damper on the natural-feeding plans of the most sanguine new parent. Yet the film isn’t a downer.
  31. Apocalypse: A Bill Callahan Tour Film
    A tantalizing glimpse of a determinedly outsider talent.
  32. Walk of Shame
    The cast does a fine collective job, and Mr. Brill’s script flirts with clever charm here and there. But the whole film is a missed opportunity because the situations repeatedly defy credibility, and the humor never says anything remotely fresh about human nature or the world we live in.
  33. NOW: In the Wings on a World Stage
    What “NOW” does well is explain why these actors love the place- and time-bound quality of live theater, most evident in the troupe’s stop at the ancient Greek theater of Epidaurus.
  34. More Than the Rainbow
    Mr. Wechsler’s film might be loose to a fault, but Mr. Weber’s work yields its share of gratifying, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it New York moments.
  35. Documented
    His strategy is political — in a meaningful way — but not cinematic.
  36. Speak the Music: Robert Mann and the Mysteries of Chamber Music
    Though colleagues and former students chime in, Mr. Miller lets Mr. Mann and his violin do most of the talking, drawing on assorted interviews and vintage performance clips that convey both the skill and the enthusiasm underpinning his subject’s long career.
  37. Bad Johnson
    A sometimes amusing sex farce.
  38. Decoding Annie Parker
    Decoding Annie Parker is considerably better than the kind of disease-of-the-week fare that used to be a television cliché.
  39. Blood Glacier
    Sometimes genre-based filmmakers don’t know how to make their material fun without making fun of their material, but that’s not a failing of Mr. Kren’s.
  40. Unclaimed
    If we brush aside the unanswered questions, what we’re left with is a simple tale of two men: One who may have been lost, and one who only felt that way.
  41. The Protector 2
    With jokes and computer-generated spectacles diluting the action, this is not one for fight-film purists.
  42. Friended to Death
    Constant close-ups give the sense that the movie itself is violating viewers’ personal space, while an earnest moral suggests that online communication can’t substitute for face-to-face interaction: a topic Friended to Death doesn’t seem to know much about.
  43. Ida
    There is an implicit argument here between faith and materialism, one that is resolved with wit, conviction and generosity of spirit. Mr. Pawlikowski has made one of the finest European films (and one of most insightful films about Europe, past and present) in recent memory.
  44. Beneath the Harvest Sky
    Beneath the Harvest Sky reaches a dramatic climax that is so rushed and confusing, you are left scratching your head. But for all its missteps, the film feels authentic. Through thick and thin, it stubbornly maintains a thorny integrity.
  45. Belle
    The weave of the personal and the political finally proves as irresistible as it is moving, partly because it has been drawn from extraordinary life.
  46. For a Woman
    The 1980s sequences, with their tears and epiphanies, are less vivid and less convincing. An inviting sense of mystery hangs over the events of 1947, Ms. Kurys’s origin story.
  47. Altered States of Plaine
    Muddy sound contributes to the atmosphere of confusion, while the script (credited to the director, Nick Gaglia, along with Mr. Gallagher and Ms. Donohue) goes nowhere.
  48. Jobriath A.D.
    It’s cruel but must be said: Presented in hushed, reverent tones, Jobriath A.D. often comes across as mockumentary material; each ghastly career move is followed by another. Hampered by limited video of Jobriath, the film lacks a sense of him or his music.
  49. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    A sequel that, until a late, lamentably foolish turn, balances blockbuster bombast with human-scale drama, child-friendly comedy and gushers of tears.
  50. The M Word
    As cavalier with structure as ever, Mr. Jaglom surrounds himself with familiars who embrace his cheery, disorderly style.
  51. Grand Slammed
    Amid the overheated, sometimes amateurish histrionics — Mr. Nizzari shoots a lengthy father-son blowout in a single, theatrical take — Grand Slammed contains inklings of a serious point about immobility in America.
  52. Tanzania: A Journey Within
    The documentary “Tanzania: A Journey Within” is two travel diaries woven together. One is somber and moving. The other is distractingly annoying.
  53. Ape
    A biting, sometimes droll look at the allure of humiliation, Ape appears simple, but its underlying machinery is joltingly clever.
  54. Marvin Seth and Stanley
    Marvin, Seth and Stanley aims to be a deadpan travels-with-my-wacky-dad story, but the father in it is almost an afterthought. It still has sublime moments, but it leaves you wanting more of them.
  55. Desert Riders
    Amid a cacophony of accusations and justifications, it’s the children’s broken limbs, ladderlike scars and disfigured, emaciated bodies that paradoxically hold the film together.
  56. Who is Dayani Cristal?
    A movie whose techniques present problems not containable by the noble intentions of its makers.
  57. For No Good Reason
    For No Good Reason is less revealing than a standard hourlong television tribute might have been... But there is enough of the man and artist here to rekindle interest and appreciation in his often disturbing pictures and an understanding of what motivated them.
  58. Bright Days Ahead
    Struggling to get out from under the film’s too-cheery surface is a much more serious movie about grown-ups confronting the depredations of old age.
  59. The Girl and Death
    The movie proves to be a fragile conceit. It’s as likely to fall apart and cause frustration as it is to induce a reverie.
  60. Walking with the Enemy
    Visually, Walking With the Enemy resembles a TV mini-series, a sense enhanced by the director Mark Schmidt’s habit of cutting away from bloodshed. Constant title cards introducing historical figures suggest the work of a completist rather than a filmmaker who has focused the material.
  61. Last Passenger
    Mr. Nooshin stirs a mystery that’s light on special effects and bravely uncomplicated. He may not have much money, but his feel for age and class dynamics is sure, and his actors respond.
  62. Young & Beautiful
    What is most striking about this movie is how un-self-conscious it is as it conducts a prurient and superficial inquiry into adolescent female sexuality.
  63. The German Doctor
    The Argentine writer and director Lucía Puenzo, shooting in wide screen, takes an effective, largely low-key approach to her fictionalization of Mengele’s time in South America.
  64. Blue Ruin
    Stingy with details and dialogue, but more than generous with atmosphere, this seductively photographed thriller (written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, who also wielded the camera) sells its empty calories with great skill.
  65. Locke
    Mr. Knight keeps a fairly steady distance from Ivan — underscoring certain tense passages with tighter close-ups — but moment by moment, with a twitch, a shudder, a look, it’s Mr. Hardy who movingly draws you in, turning a stranger’s face into a life.
  66. The Other Woman
    This female revenge comedy is so dumb, lazy, clumsily assembled and unoriginal, it could crush any actor forced to execute its leaden slapstick gags and mouth its crude, humorless dialogue.
  67. The Quiet Ones
    There are nice touches... Yet many of the movie’s more nominally horrific elements are too familiar.
  68. Brick Mansions
    Brawny, dumb and preposterous, it nonetheless comes tantalizingly close to being a high-impact allegory of race, class and real estate in a postindustrial, new-Gilded Age America.
  69. Next Goal Wins
    In some ways, this is just another underdogs-go-for-it sports movie. In others, it is as sensitive and observant as an Edith Wharton novel.
  70. 2 States
    2 States is an effort to go beyond formula while also embracing formulaic elements, including some nice song-and-dance sequences. The mix isn’t right yet. But that ambition provides its own tensions and energies, which help 2 States from feeling becalmed.
  71. Bends
    Shot in sleek tones by Christopher Doyle, the film melds class-conscious melodrama with malleable mood piece, but keeps threatening to fade from understatement into stasis.
  72. Bicycling With Molière
    The screenplay ultimately bears out Alceste’s observations about treachery, selfishness and deceit, but with such charm and zest that their sting tickles more than it hurts.
  73. A Haunted House 2
    Already the franchise displays a sputtering exhaustion.
  74. Small Time
    Small Time is agreeably sentimental meat-and-potatoes fare with strong dashes of humor, executed with a sincerity that’s hard to resist.
  75. A Promise
    Ms. Hall’s Lotte is the weak link in the triangle. Despite all her character’s flowery words of longing, she can’t convey the heat bottled under Lotte’s demure demeanor.
  76. Vanishing Pearls: The Oystermen of Pointe a la Hache
    Vanishing Pearls is most illuminating when offering a historical perspective.
  77. Home, James
    A small, gentle riff on the eternal tug of war between small towns and big dreams.
  78. Tasting Menu
    Roger Gual’s half-baked film hopes to split the difference between romantic comedy and foodie delight but fails at both.
  79. Proxy
    Employing scaled-down sets and low-budget audacity, Mr. Parker, an intelligent and boundary-testing filmmaker, proves less concerned with logic than with how far he can push his characters.
  80. Make Your Move
    Mr. Hough, a “Dancing With the Stars” champion, impresses with his footwork and sufficiently fulfills his romantic-lead duties. BoA is cute and appealingly impudent, but a bit more remote. On the floor, however, their chemistry ignites.
  81. That Demon Within
    Pulp done with passion can be its own reward, as the veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Dante Lam shows with his feverish cop thriller That Demon Within.
  82. Soft in the Head
    From a dramatic standpoint, the movie can be unconvincing... From a formal standpoint, though, the movie impresses, maintaining a sense of anxiety through tight shots and a sound design that favors overlapping voices and constant clatter.
  83. Manakamana
    By focusing on such a narrow slice of Nepali life, Ms. Spray and Mr. Velez have ceded any totalizing claim on the truth and instead settled for a perfect incompleteness.
  84. Kid Cannabis
    The film’s main distraction, oddly, is the voice-over through which Nate annotates the action. A voice-over is standard procedure for the wistful-look-back genre, but here it’s forced and unfunny. This wild story sells itself, no narration needed.
  85. Half The Road: The Passion, Pitfalls & Power of Women's Professional Cycling
    The message is repeated ad infinitum; this documentary is painfully long for a project of this kind.
  86. The Final Member
    This wonderfully weird documentary pinpoints the desire to preserve fleeting glories.
  87. Cesar's Last Fast
    Chavez (1927-1993), a founder of what became the United Farm Workers union, faced brutal odds, as this compelling documentary demonstrates.
  88. Authors Anonymous
    Mr. Farina gives Authors Anonymous a sharpness it otherwise lacks.
  89. 13 Sins
    13 Sins is occasionally inventive but mostly uninvolving.
  90. Bears
    Despite the bracing beauty of the wilderness, and the respite provided by cubs at play, the movie is primarily a sobering treatise on survival.
  91. Fading Gigolo
    Mr. Turturro’s musical choices in Fading Gigolo tend to feel, like so much here, generically applied instead of meaningfully coaxed from some essential, lived-in truth.
  92. Transcendence
    Transcendence is a dark, lurchingly entertaining pastiche of age-old worries, future-shock jolts, hot-button topics and old-fashioned genre thrills.
  93. Heaven Is for Real
    Preachy and pretty, Heaven is a classy-looking product with a vanilla flavor and a pastel palette.
  94. Visions of Mary Frank
    There’s a loose, bohemian quality to Mr. Cohen’s sketch of a film.
  95. The Jewish Cardinal
    It holds your interest, even if Jean-Marie remains what he must be to Mr. Cohen: an enticing puzzlement, his faith a mystery.
  96. The Railway Man
    Mr. Firth gives a reserved, compelling performance.
  97. Hank and Asha
    Though not very ambitious, this winsome, whisper-thin tale shimmers along with the charming urge to connect and reveal yourself that links its two correspondents.
  98. Perfect Sisters
    Ms. Breslin and especially Ms. Henley are quite good, elevating a film that seems like an oft-told tale.
  99. No God, No Master
    Dignified to a fault and crammed with historical worthies (like a pre-deportation Emma Goldman), this dry tour of union hall strife and kitchen table sentiment wears its sympathies proudly.
  100. A Fragile Trust
    Lightness of touch is missing from the film, which features animated graphics and an ominous score.
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