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. Dancing in Jaffa
    Predictably, the film culminates in a dance competition, irresistible to behold and leading to an ending just about too pat to believe.
  2. Unthinkable: An Airline Captain's Story
    Unthinkable is unwatchable, which is too bad, because there are certainly enough oddities in the incident it tries to dramatize to have made for a decent conspiracy theory film.
  3. Cuban Fury
    Not that some of this isn’t amusing, but you feel the considerable improvisational skills of the cast going to waste.
  4. Jinn
    Most of the time, this incoherent thriller resembles an overheated trailer for itself: a glaringly rough assembly of ill-staged computer-generated action sequences and portentous moments.
  5. Rio 2
    A tropical tornado of cadmium and cobalt, magenta and marigold, Carlos Saldanha’s frantic follow-up to his well-received 2011 animated feature, “Rio,” ups the ante on sound and movement but pays scant attention to story.
  6. Oculus
    A derivative but efficient chiller that cribs from “Solaris,” “The Shining” and “The Amityville Horror” yet also shows glimmers of imagination.
  7. Draft Day
    I don’t really buy Draft Day — it’s a shallow and evasive movie, built more around corporate wish fulfillment than around reality — but I have to say that it sells itself beautifully.
  8. The King of Escape
    The King of Escape is more loosely put together than “Stranger,” and, considering what happens, it’s relatively underplayed.
  9. Joe
    Mr. Cage gives his most committed performance in years as this divided soul, but it still looks like acting when compared with Mr. Poulter’s embodiment of pure evil.
  10. Only Lovers Left Alive
    In many ways, Only Lovers Left Alive is among Mr. Jarmusch’s most voluptuous movies — full of rare and gorgeous images and sounds, heavy with wistful sighs and sprinkled with wry, knowing jokes — but it is also thin and pale, and perhaps too afraid of daylight for its own good.
  11. Hateship Loveship
    Ms. Johnson and the screenwriter, Mark Jude Poirier, have transformed a taciturn masterpiece into an absorbing, messy, modest story of damaged relationships.
  12. Being Ginger
    Sweet, funny and ultimately rather touching.
  13. Alien Abduction
    Matty Beckerman’s Alien Abduction repackages ancient legend for modern audiences in a found-footage story of streamlined efficiency.
  14. Watermark
    Always arresting and sometimes troubling, Watermark — aside from the odd comment here and there — neither lectures nor argues.
  15. Goodbye World
    As these overwritten characters cope and make fresh romantic missteps, the movie cruises obliviously along, littered with glib dialogue and howler developments.
  16. Nymphomaniac: Volume II
    The problem with Nymphomaniac: Volume II lies not in its display of erect penises and reddened buttocks, but rather in its dull narrative and overworked ideas.
  17. In the Blood
    Deficient even in most of its set pieces, In the Blood does Ms. Carano (and Caribbean tourism) few favors. Somebody, please give her a better script and director.
  18. Frankie & Alice
    Ms. Berry does a decent job with the role, and the film treats its subject matter respectfully, but the overall package doesn’t rise above ordinariness.
  19. Alan Partridge
    The plot of Alan Partridge (also known as “Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa”) is designed not for coherence but to maximize the chances for Mr. Coogan to riff in character and to bring his alter ego to the very edge of either improbable likability or utter awfulness.
  20. The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden
    The Galapagos Affair would be a much stronger film were it not padded with the dull reminiscences and speculation of the settlers’ descendants.
  21. Ilo Ilo
    This remarkably terse movie doesn’t waste a word or an image. It refuses to linger over each little crisis its characters endure. And its detachment lends a perspective that widens the film’s vision of people reacting to events beyond their control.
  22. Flex Is Kings
    Because of the rote and typical way of organizing a dance movie around a contest, the pace and interest lag even though the images and characters are fascinating. Yet the film is worth watching because of the strong cinematography and the glimpses of strange beauty in the dance moves.
  23. Under the Skin
    The movie’s eerie, climactic image challenges our conventional notions of human identity and leaves us reflecting on the possibility that every being in the universe is an alien in disguise.
  24. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    Given how little creative wiggle room there is in properties like The Winter Soldier, it’s a minor triumph that the Russos imprint any personality on the movie, which is less a stand-alone work than a part of an ever-expanding multimedia enterprise.
  25. 10 Rules for Sleeping Around
    A sex comedy can sometimes get by, even if it is deficient in one of the two things that term promises. But a sex comedy that is short on both sex and comedy is unlikely to please anyone.
  26. The Unknown Known
    The film is a cat-and-mouse game in which each player thinks he’s the cat, making it both thrilling and disconcerting to watch. It is also a nature documentary about behavior at the very top of the imperial food chain and a detective story about the search for a mystery that is hidden in plain sight.
  27. The Retrieval
    Mr. Eska’s choices are thoughtful if sometimes studied: the movie is well cast with solid performers, and if the handsome digital images look overly sharp, as if outlined in razor, he consistently makes the most of his limited resources.
  28. Dom Hemingway
    Dom Hemingway is a bright, shiny bauble with next to no lasting power.
  29. Go Down Death
    Rather than distressed retro photography, or Guy Maddin mash-up fantasias, the movie’s often deadpan episodes feel like something out of one-act theater
  30. Jews of Egypt
    Mr. Ramses’s admirable eagerness to tell a good tale seems to have favored excitement over facts.
  31. Greencard Warriors
    At first, there is something a little too straightforward about the characters and their dialogue. But gradually, a group of strong, sure performances and the script’s twists... take hold, and we are fully involved.
  32. Nothing Without You
    Even if we can get past unlikely details (like a mental institution that allows patients to play with scissors), the drab locations and dull performances suck the air out of a story (by Mr. Irving and Rick Santos) that’s every bit as troubled as its unappealing heroine.
  33. Blumenthal
    Sharp yet overdetermined, Blumenthal doesn’t breathe naturally — it’s a comedy in a box. Just not a box that everyone will want to open.
  34. Cheap Thrills
    This is dark comedy indeed, and if viewed as such, it works deliciously.
  35. The Raid 2
    The pleasant surprise of Gareth Evans’s sturdy sequel to “The Raid: Redemption” is that neither its undercover drama nor its two-and-a-half-hour length bog down the bracing, and numerous, fight fests.
  36. Refuge
    Jessica Goldberg, who wrote and directed the film, prefers showcasing the somewhat treacly soundtrack to fleshing out back stories.
  37. Mistaken for Strangers
    A tale of two brothers, one band and a boatload of psychological baggage, Mistaken for Strangers is, like its maker, scruffy, undisciplined and eager to be loved. The big surprise is how easy it is to comply.
  38. Breathe In
    What distinguishes Breathe In from countless similar movies about marital discontent and disruption is the restraint with which the story is handled, the subtlety of its performances and its almost perverse refusal to turn into a prurient, heavy-breathing examination of adultery and its consequences.
  39. Hide Your Smiling Faces
    As the local boys (there are no girls) explore the natural world in summer, this gorgeously photographed movie bombards you with imagined scents of ripeness and decay.
  40. Finding Vivian Maier
    The film, which [Mr. Maloof] directed with Charlie Siskel, is absorbing, touching and satisfyingly enjoyable because Maier was a fascinating, poignant and somewhat enigmatic woman.
  41. Sabotage
    Sabotage isn’t any good, even if its jagged, jolting visual excesses and frenzied energy keep you awake, gasping and guffawing by turns.
  42. Cesar Chavez
    What the film struggles to depict, committed as it is to the conventions of hagiography, is the long and complex work of organizing people to defend their own interests. You are invited to admire what Cesar Chavez did, but it may be more vital to understand how he did it.
  43. Noah
    Mr. Aronofsky’s earnest, uneven, intermittently powerful film, is both a psychological case study and a parable of hubris and humility. At its best, its shares some its namesake’s ferocious conviction, and not a little of his madness.
  44. Brothers Hypnotic
    The fearless streak displayed by the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble deserves its equivalent in a bolder movie technique. But Mr. Atlas delivers a rousing finale.
  45. Stay
    The movie, admirably shot on location, has a cast that is nonetheless directed without much verve by Wiebke von Carolsfeld. The film was adapted from a novel by Aislinn Hunter, but the characters’ inner lives remain elusive.
  46. Rob the Mob
    Vividly painting Queens in the early 1990s as a landscape of crack and graffiti, the filmmakers go on to smother any menace with a swoony-upbeat soundtrack and an “oh, those kooky kids” tone.
  47. The French Minister
    Mr. Tavernier’s filmmaking here is loose, almost casual, and you may not always notice what he’s doing with the camera as he frames the ministry’s choreographed chaos with its whirling people and parts.
  48. Blood Ties
    There are some very good performances and parts of performances in Blood Ties, but the movie fails to convey a sense of tribal identity within this world.
  49. McCanick
    The dour McCanick banks way too much on what it is not telling us, making for a movie that thinks it’s being cryptically suspenseful but is really just annoying.
  50. Awakened
    It’s a poorly acted grab bag of shopworn ideas and hyperbolic behaviors that not even Ryan Murphy could translate into entertainment.
  51. Just a Sigh
    The movie is beautifully acted, and the chemistry between Ms. Devos, who is 49 (her character is 43), and Mr. Byrne, 63, is heated in a sadder-but-wiser, grown-up way.
  52. American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs
    Ms. Lee could have delved more deeply into Ms. Boggs’s thoughts, and slips into glib autopilot by using archival footage with sound effects or repeating ideas of personal transformation. But in sharing her subject’s life achievements, she raises meaningful questions and keeps them profitably open.
  53. Jodorowsky's Dune
    Cheerfully partial and unapologetically deferential to its subject’s operatic self-promotion, Jodorowsky’s Dune makes you wish that he had scraped together the final $5 million needed, we are told, to realize his dream.
  54. Anita
    Anita is an important historical document about an event that prompted a larger cultural conversation about sexual harassment. But, perhaps more important, it conveys Ms. Hill’s journey from an accuser alone to an activist who shares with, and listens to, others.
  55. A Birder's Guide to Everything
    This gentle comedy, the first feature directed by Rob Meyer, is an eye opener for anyone who takes the everyday natural world for granted. It is also a quiet brief for the cultivation of intellectual curiosity and scientific exploration at an age when hormones rule so much behavior.
  56. It Felt Like Love
    A mood poem to summer loving and sexual awakening, It Felt Like Love powerfully evokes a time when flesh is paramount, and peer behavior is the standard by which we judge our own.
  57. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    You’re unlikely to turn away. The problem with aesthetic shocks is that their power can drain off and their original effects become harder to replicate, so we’ll just have to see what happens next.
  58. Muppets Most Wanted
    The whole film seems to have a vague heaviness to it. The best Muppet movies have been great because they had charm. There’s no charm here, really; just self-referential jokes, decent but not memorable songs, and lots and lots of cameos.
  59. Divergent
    Ms. Roth’s prose style is good enough and Tris appealing enough that, at least in the book, it’s easy to breeze past the plot holes. It’s harder to ignore those flaws in the movie, partly because the director, Neil Burger (“Limitless”), gives you little to hang onto — beauty, thrills, a visual style.
  60. The Missing Picture
    The audacity of The Missing Picture — a brilliant documentary about a child who held on to life in Cambodia’s killing fields — is equaled only by its soulfulness.
  61. Bewakoofiyaan
    This tale of a yuppie couple (played by Ayushmann Khurrana and Sonam Kapoor) flirts with intriguing notions of recessionary struggle, though strained, contrived humor bogs it down.
  62. Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club
    Mr. Perry’s latest film touches upon some recognizable and realistic challenges with efficient compassion, but there’s probably more dramatic tension in a car pool than in this film’s collection of predicaments.
  63. The Anonymous People
    However good the intentions, this sluggish documentary about the stigma of substance abuse and the barriers to recovery never comes close to catching fire.
  64. Shirin in Love
    It’s the kind of movie that makes you zero in on and root for an actor (Ms. Madigan) as she tries to wring something real out of her lines, but there’s no saving this film.
  65. Exposed
    These confrontational comedians — however serious the message, it’s always imparted with liberal dollops of humor — are experts at merging shock and showmanship.
  66. Dark House
    Sadly, the only thing audiences are likely to find horrific is the acting. Or the possibility that any of these people might make another movie.
  67. Teenage
    A lot of intriguing ideas are floated in Teenage... But the film takes a point of view that leaves all of them underdeveloped.
  68. Xingu
    The movie covers almost three decades choppily. But Mr. Camarago and Mr. Miguel convey the stubborn commitment that made the brothers so revered by the tribes.
  69. The Cold Lands
    The Cold Lands feels as if it were just taking hold when it reaches the end of the road.
  70. The Den
    Almost every image in this movie — from webcams, websites and laptop cameras — appears on a monitor. Scenes pulse with the Internet’s speed and sprawl, aided by clever editing that pops. The effect is insular, off-putting and disconcertingly familiar.
  71. Himizu
    Mr. Sono uses sound, a low, grumbling noise like an earthquake, to convey this chaos. He also gives the film a harrowing cacophony and a sense of trauma with sound effects, including subtle echoes.
  72. Guilty of Romance
    Most disturbing and fascinating is the mixture of Izumi’s liberation with her degradation in this film, which plays like a more horrific version of David Lynch’s “Mullholland Drive.”
  73. The Art of the Steal
    Matt Dillon and Kurt Russell may not make the most convincing half-brothers, but The Art of the Steal is a fairly amusing heist film with some sibling tension helping the story along.
  74. Big Men
    Dropping us into a perfect storm of avarice, this cool and incisive snapshot of global capitalism at work is as remarkable for its access as for its refusal to judge.
  75. On My Way
    Because Ms. Deneuve, 70, is in almost every scene, On My Way feels like Ms. Bercot’s loving character study of a star who has always stood above the fray, a symbol of resilient Gallic femininity.
  76. Better Living Through Chemistry
    Better Living Through Chemistry never becomes a full-fledged film noir. It reads as an unabashedly positive infomercial for gorging on the apparently risk-free, liberating products of Big Pharma.
  77. Enemy
    Much of the fun in Enemy, which is tightly constructed and expertly shot, lies in Mr. Gyllenhaal’s playful and subtle performances.
  78. Bad Words
    It would be something to see Mr. Bateman go authentically dark (perhaps not that dark), but it’s also enough just to watch him as he widens his eyes, furrows his brow and shows off his excellent timing.
  79. Veronica Mars
    A likable, unmemorable, feature-length footnote to the admired television series.
  80. Need For Speed
    An energetic, unpretentious B movie — the kind best seen at a drive-in like the one in an early scene — it is devoted, above all, to the delivery of visceral, kinetic excitement.
  81. Ernest & Célestine
    Mostly, Ernest & Celestine is an ode to the happiness that comes from being with those different from us.
  82. Le Week-End
    Don’t be fooled by Mr. Broadbent’s genial sarcasm, Ms. Duncan’s warm smile or the literary felicities of Mr. Kureishi’s script. This is not a movie about the gentle aging of lovable codgers.
  83. Total Siyapaa (Total Chaos)
    The cramped first half, mostly in the Singh apartment, is crudely unfunny.
  84. Bethlehem
    Bethlehem is emphatically political, as perhaps any movie about warring Israelis and Palestinians must be. Yet its ideas are more complex than is suggested by either its schematic story or fast-moving genre elements.
  85. The Face of Love
    That Mr. Posin and Mr. McDuffie have stacked the deck against Nikki would be more irritating if Ms. Bening didn’t immediately make this woman come so satisfyingly alive, breathing believable vitality and at times contradictory emotions into what might have otherwise registered as a blur or cliché.
  86. Honey
    Honey, the impressive debut feature by Ms. Golino, sustains a contemplative mood with undersaturated cinematography that evokes the world as perceived through a light mist.
  87. Grand Piano
    This proudly old-fashioned movie will pull any trick in the book to hold your attention. And it needs those tricks: Damien Chazelle’s screenplay is sloppy, ludicrous and ultimately devoid of suspense.
  88. Journey to the West
    Mr. Chow has perhaps achieved more sustained and elaborate adventures, but he hits a sweet spot of comedy that never grows too self-aware or forgets the value of a good, clean demon whomping.
  89. 300: Rise of an Empire
    The naval collisions and melees play out in panel-like renderings that are bold and satisfying for the first half-hour but lack the momentum and bombastic je ne sais quoi of “300.”
  90. Haunt
    The shocks are short and sharp, the acting is strongest where it counts, and the director of photography, Adam Marsden, washes everything in a swampy green that makes spooks pop.
  91. Awful Nice
    In general, the film feels like all setup and no punch line.
  92. War of the Worlds: Goliath
    Considering that the fate of humankind is at stake, War of the Worlds: Goliath is remarkably uninvolving.
  93. The Island of St. Matthews
    It’s a stretch to call Mr. Everson’s film a documentary.
  94. Special ID
    Maddeningly muddled and frustratingly counterintuitive... the story shuttles between Hong Kong and mainland China without a noticeable gain in logic or reduction in decibels.
  95. In Fear
    Economical in the extreme — but without appearing cash-poor — this tightly wound thriller proves that minimal resources can sometimes produce more than satisfying results.
  96. Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    [The film] is not perfect, but it is fast-moving, intermittently witty and pretty good fun.
  97. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    The Grand Budapest Hotel, Mr. Anderson’s eighth feature, will delight his fans, but even those inclined to grumble that it’s just more of the same patented whimsy might want to look again. As a sometime grumbler and longtime fan, I found myself not only charmed and touched but also moved to a new level of respect.
  98. Interior. Leather Bar.
    A sly conceptual coup d’art and a deeply sincere exploration of masculinity and its discontents, with a little hot sex thrown in.
  99. Particle Fever
    Particle Fever is a fascinating movie about science, and an exciting, revealing and sometimes poignant movie about scientists.
  100. Repentance
    A movie of modest means that nevertheless offers a fairly cohesive story and at least one standout performance. It may underplay an idea laden with potential, but at least that notion is present.
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