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. Blood Diamond
    While Mr. DiCaprio turns out to be an ideal fit for Blood Diamond, there's an insolvable disconnect between this serious story and the frivolous way it has been told. There is no reason to doubt the filmmakers' sincerity; only their filmmaking.
  2. Wedding Crashers
    Reasonably enjoyable until its guys are forced to grow up. Because bad behavior is usually more fun to watch than good, the movie is especially fine during the preliminaries.
  3. Changing Times
    In Changing Times, Mr. Téchiné, the great French director, is near the peak of his form. Weaving a half dozen subplots, he creates a set of variations on the theme of divided sensibilities tugging one another into states of perpetual unrest and possible happiness.
  4. Freedom Writers
    In Freedom Writers Hilary Swank uses neediness to fine effect in a film with a strong emotional tug and smartly laid foundation.
  5. X-Men
    Clumsy when it should be light on its feet, the movie takes itself even more seriously than the comic book and its fans do, which is a superheroic achievement.
  6. Bright Young Things
    Waugh's dialogue, effortlessly catching the lockjaw intonations and facetious mannerisms of the British aristocracy between the world wars, is a gift to screenwriters and performers alike. The actors Mr. Fry has assembled receive the gift with gusto and grace.
  7. Stage Beauty
    As drama, Stage Beauty is both timorous and ungainly, words that might also describe Ms. Danes's performance.
  8. Stealing the Fire
    The material is disparate and wide ranging, and it is often difficult to follow Mr. Friedman and Mr. Nadler down all the side streets and back alleys of their investigation.
  9. Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes
    A fairly tough-minded film until the end, when several commentators who have been critical suddenly turn misty-eyed and suggest that underneath it all, Holmes was really a sweetie.
  10. How I Killed a Saint
    Successfully conveys the pervasive anxiety of a country on the brink of civil war.
  11. The Other Guys
    Raises expectations that it has no real inclination to fulfill. The movie's best bits would stand alone nicely on YouTube, or on Funnyordie.com, the comic video boutique of which Mr. McKay is an owner and where he sometimes dabbles in short-form hilarity.
  12. 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.
  13. Kelly & Cal
    The performances of Ms. Lewis and Mr. Weston crackle with authenticity. Like a good punk-rock song, this bracingly honest, tough-minded vignette stays true to itself.
  14. Medeas
    Capturing the poetry of bodies at rest and a landscape frozen in time (filming was done primarily in the Santa Clarita area of California), Chayse Irvin’s exquisite 35-millimeter photography is dreamy and sometimes devastating.
  15. Young Bodies Heal Quickly
    Some of the deadpan moments and more fraught exchanges don’t really come off. But all in all, it’s one curious, and furious, escapade.
  16. Call Me Lucky
    The movie strains to drum up mystery as to the sources of Mr. Crimmins’s rage. When it finally spills the beans, you feel unnecessarily manipulated.
  17. The Serpent and the Rainbow
    Mr. Craven's attempts at such effects are always gripping, but here they are sometimes overpowered by the complexity of the material. The search for the zombifying elixir, the influence of the Tontons Macoute, the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship and the mysterious powers of voodoo sometimes run together in a manner less provocative than confusing.
  18. Flight of the Navigator
    Flight of the Navigator may not have the originality of a true classic; and while its special effects provide some dazzling moments, they are not quite fresh enough to be brilliant. But the film is so absorbing, such constant fun, that it may well be the best family film around.
  19. Once Bitten
    Once Bitten affects a glossy, sophisticated look that does little to upgrade the film's adolescent humor. As directed by Howard Storm, it has a lot more stylishness than wit. Miss Hutton looks great in black, but her predatory vampire grows tiresome very quickly, as do all the Bloody Mary jokes.
  20. The Traitor
    Bellocchio’s approach to the story is at once coolly objective — the movie is part biopic, part courtroom procedural — and almost feverishly intense. He has a historian’s analytical detachment, a novelist’s compassion for his characters and a citizen’s outrage at the cruelty and corruption that have festered in his country for so long.
  21. I Wanna Hold Your Hand
    Some routines work a lot better than others, but the whole film sparkles with a boisterous lunacy that's perfectly in keeping with the frenzy of the fans.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Train Robbers
    As an exercise in pleasantness, The Train Robbers is an interesting addition to the late history of the traditional unpretentious Western.
  23. Mafia Inc
    For better or worse, Grou has a knack for staging brutality, and for having his movie rock out to a Joy Division track or two.
  24. Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens
    It's a frenetic farce that takes the form of a folksy study of Smalltown, U.S.A., where there is no problem that can't eventually be solved on top of a bed, in a bath.
  25. The Anthrax Attacks
    Many documentaries have dealt with real-life ambiguity by making it part of their structure and argument. This one treats it as an afterthought.
  26. Gladiator II
    Like Scott’s filmmaking in this pleasurably immersive spectacle — with its foreign ancients and mentalities, exotic animals and equally unfamiliar calls to human nobility — Washington’s performance has skill, intensity and absolute confidence.
  27. Take Care of Maya
    Take Care of Maya is grueling, but it is also oddly deficient, wanting for the precision and perspective essential to deriving insight from profound trauma.
  28. Snack Shack
    With its rambling momentum and quick-witted, almost musical dialogue, it feels less like “Superbad” than a Robert Altman movie, sort of like a pint-size “California Split.”
  29. Something New
    The film is good news nonetheless - it's a store-bought valentine with real heart.
  30. Nobody
    As slick as a blood spill and as single-minded as a meat grinder, Nobody hustles us along with a swiftness that blurs the foolishness of its plot and the depravity of its message.
  31. Patriot Games
    The fierce-looking Sean Bean is outstandingly good as Ryan's main antagonist, and Patrick Bergin brings the right air of calculation to the terrorist mastermind he plays. Several of the film's main sequences, like an encounter between Mr. Bean's Sean Miller and David Threlfall as the police inspector who has been his captor, derive their horror from the looks of pure loathing that these terrorists bestow upon their prey.
  32. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
    While Mr. Moshé’s ambitions can be frustratingly modest, he does know that — however fraudulent the genre’s myths — the image of a man riding a horse into the sunset is in our cinematic DNA.
  33. 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.
  34. The Horse Boy
    The film is not a primer on this heartbreaking condition. Instead it recounts a deeply personal, highly subjective and inarguably thought-provoking story of one family’s quest for a certain kind of peace.
  35. Halston
    I liked the deluge of visual information and personalities. The pictures, footage, biography, news and gossip are the opposite of a Halston dress — unruly, busy, fussed over. But they come at you with an energy that feels substantial. Knowing what to do with all of that material is its own kind of intelligence. Why overthink it? Or: why show us what you’ve overthought?
  36. The Mountain
    Like Alverson’s 2015 character study, “Entertainment,” The Mountain sets forth a profoundly anhedonic vision of America — and humanity — that’s simultaneously upsetting and mesmerizing.
  37. Kinds of Kindness
    It’s a triptych that at first seems slight, then gains meaning the longer you hold its three seemingly disconnected short films in juxtaposition and peer through the overlaps.
  38. Bright Future
    Casts its spell by drawing out the horror of everyday existence bit by bit, and then tossing in some otherworldly weirdness that makes the hair on the back of your neck try to run for cover.
  39. Dreamin' Wild
    While it can occasionally seem as though Pohlad is eking out conflict to support a narrative, the film’s restraint ultimately works in its favor, offering a thoughtful meditation on music, creativity and what it really means for talent to be “overlooked.”
  40. Futuro Beach
    Balancing its abstract storytelling with commanding visuals (by the gifted cinematographer Ali Olcay Gözkaya), Futuro Beach explores liberation and reinvention, the tug of familiarity versus the allure of the foreign.
  41. The Great Santini
    Mr. Duvall, Miss Danner and Mr. O'Keefe are the main reasons you should see The Great Santini. They play together with the kind of ease and self-assurance that, in a movie, is as exhilarating as it is rare.
  42. Ready Player One
    Mr. Spielberg, a digital enthusiast and an old-school cineaste, goes further than most filmmakers in exploring the aesthetic possibilities of a form that is frequently dismissed and misunderstood.
  43. It Could Happen to You
    The other miracle is that the two stars of It Could Happen to You keep it sailing over a script that is often as predictable and flat as the movie's new title.
  44. The Capote Tapes
    There’s some fascinating and provocative material in The Capote Tapes that is diluted by the director Ebs Burnough’s insistence on teasing a question that, arguably, has a self-evident answer.
  45. Proof
    It's funny how movies about smart people often play so dumb.
  46. Star Trek: Insurrection
    Insurrection is breezily paced, and Michael Piller's screenplay has enough good-natured humor to keep things from bogging down into sentimental pomposity.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    You're Gonna Miss Me
    Luckily, the director Keven McAlester keeps Mr. Erickson's humanity front and center. He lets music critics and musicians praise Mr. Erickson's smiling banshee voice (which influenced Janis Joplin) and pioneering use of feedback, but he doesn't insist on his subject's genius or oversell his importance.
  48. Amistad
    Dwarfed by the enormity of what it means to illustrate, the diffuse Amistad divides its energies among many concerns: the pain and strangeness of the captives' experience, the Presidential election in which they become a factor, the stirrings of civil war, and the great many bewhiskered abolitionists and legal representatives who argue about their fate.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Donovan's Reef
    This running account of Pier 6 brawls, miscegenation, romance and religion that disrupt the idyllic life on a post-World War II South Sea island paradise is sheer contrivance effected in hearty, fun-loving, truly infectious style.
  50. Jack Goes Boating
    As is so often the case in modest, aimless little movies like this one, it is the acting that saves Jack Goes Boating from triviality or worse.
  51. In a Valley of Violence
    Mr. West retains his signature restraint and slow-burn approach to brutality. Missing, however, is his typically skillful manipulation of tension, partly because his tone veers so often from jokey to reverential, from winking at the western to making a sacrament of it.
  52. The Big Picture
    The Big Picture, the first theatrical film to be directed by the talented Christopher Guest (a co-writer and a star of ''This Is Spinal Tap), is a consistently genial, intermittently funny send-up of the current Hollywood scene as demonstrated by the rise and fall of an award-winning film student.
  53. The Muppet Christmas Carol
    There's no great show of wit or tunefulness here, and the ingenious cross-generational touches are fairly rare. But there is a lively kiddie version of the Dickens tale, one that very young viewers ought to understand.
  54. We Are X
    [A] fascinating and assured documentary.
  55. Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki
    It’s never boring but a trifle diffuse. If you’re a Miyazaki fan, you’ll want to see it anyway.
  56. The Lodge
    Despite its visual flair and unrelentingly taut atmosphere, The Lodge is more successful in sustaining unease — like the eerie, unexplained shots of a spooky dollhouse — than in building a convincing narrative
  57. Sebastian
    While sex drives Sebastian, the movie is stuck in foreplay mode.
  58. Café Society
    It is, overall, an amusing little picture, with some inspired moments and some sour notes, a handful of interesting performances and the hint, now and then, of an idea.
  59. Peter Pan
    Mr. Hogan understands both themes, and his filmmaking style is a perfect mixture of wide-eyed wonder and slightly melancholy sophistication.
  60. 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.
  61. Gattaca
    A handsome and fully imagined work of cautionary futuristic fiction.
  62. Robots
    In the end, though, Robots is hollow and mechanical, an echo chamber of other movies and an awkward attempt to turn the intrinsically scary sensitive-robot theme into something heartwarming and cute.
  63. Fire
    Written and directed by Deepa Mehta, this glossy melodrama, mixing references to Indian mysticism and the epic poetry of the "Ramayana" with late-20th-century feminism, teeters unsteadily between sociology and soap opera.
  64. Summer of 69
    Fortunately, Summer of 69 is a two-hander, and Fineman brings comic chops and genuine feeling to playing the tutor with a heart of gold.
  65. Conversation Piece
    Conversation Piece is a disaster, the kind that prompts giggles from victims in the audience who, willingly, sit through it all feeling as if they were drowning in three inches of water.
  66. Last Call at the Oasis
    However frustrated they may be by political paralysis, corporate trickery or plain human stupidity, none of them seem inclined to give up. When they do, we really will be screwed, and we won't have or need movies like this to tell us so.
  67. Asura: The City of Madness
    As the suspense slackens and blood starts spilling nearly to the point of self-parody, it almost seems designed as a test of mettle — for both the filmmakers and the audience.
  68. Starting Over
    Starting Over depicts an abandoned man in all his misery, and still manages to be fast and funny while it breaks new ground.
  69. Ladyhawke
    Mr. Donner has obvious difficulty coordinating the various elements of the overall vision.
  70. The Apprentice
    The only news here — and, really, the greatest surprise — is how thoroughly this ribald, at times predictably unflattering movie humanizes its protagonist, a classic American striver.
  71. Greyhound
    While much of the movie was shot on an actual ship, there is a lot of C.G.I., and a good deal of it is not entirely convincing. “Greyhound” also feels like a movie that was conceived as an epic but could not quite muster the necessary force. As such, it’s ultimately one of Hanks’s most perfunctory pictures.
  72. The Mystic Masseur
    A subtle, humorous, illuminating study of politics, power and social mobility.
  73. Trekkies
    It is probably hopeless in the presence of Trekkies to do anything but sit back -- amused, bemused and astonished -- and watch the devotions of fans of the various incarnations of "Star Trek."
  74. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    If the movie has loads of nerve, its ambitious fusion of cartoons and live-action comedy is only fitfully amusing.
  75. The Butterfly
    Its scrupulous, even-toned gentleness makes " The Butterfly suitable for children, while its clear-eyed intelligence and refusal to condescend should make it appealing to adults.
  76. Vengo
    Seems held back by vestiges of an old-fashioned format that Mr. Gatlif has long since outgrown.
  77. Blood Work
    A wry exercise in geriatric uplift.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men
    An expert rendition of an ancient legend that is as pretty as its Technical hues and as lively as a sturdy Western.
  79. The Fourth Protocol
    A coolly efficient thriller with an octopus of a plot.
  80. The Nutty Professor
    Mr. Murphy proves himself a surprisingly strong actor here, playing Sherman with sweetness and poignancy, not to mention loads of funny weight-related humor.
  81. Silverado
    Silverado is sufficiently modern to make its landscapes bigger, its people smaller and its moral polarities less powerfully distinct than those of simpler, more starkly beautiful westerns gone by.
  82. The Paradine Case
    Call it a mystery melodrama...Call it a courtroom tragi-romance or a husband-wife problem play. Call it, indeed, a social satire and you won't be entirely wrong. For it's all of these things rolled together in one fitfully intriguing tale, smoothly told through a cultivated camera.
  83. In Search of a Midnight Kiss
    In Search of a Midnight Kiss has its derivative moments along with awkward patches -- the inelegantly shaped climax tries to force uninteresting parallels between the two central couples -- it manages the difficult task of creating a sustained, plausible and inviting world.
  84. Lymelife
    Despite such floundering, Lymelife keeps you hooked, mostly through Mr. Hutton, Mr. Baldwin and Kieran Culkin as Scott's older brother, Jimmy.
  85. The Professional
    Lacks the sexy elan of "La Femme Nikita" and suffers from infinitely worse culture shock. [18 Nov 1994, p.C18]
  86. Cupcakes
    This candy-coated confection is so irresistible that you’re captivated by its sentiment even as you acknowledge its manipulations.
  87. Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans
    It doesn’t really succeed in conveying McQueen’s great passion for auto racing. In truth, it mostly makes him seem like a jerk — but cinephiles might enjoy it as a case study of moviemaking gone wrong.
  88. Shortbus
    An ode to the joy and sweet release of sex, the film manages to be a sincere, modest political venture that finds humor where you might least expect it, notably in a ménage à trois featuring a cheeky rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner."
  89. The Grey
    It's a fine, tough little movie, technically assured and brutally efficient, with a simple story that ventures into some profound existential territory without making a big fuss about it.
  90. Mifune: The Last Samurai
    It’s a brisk and energetic primer for those who don’t know his movies or are ready to watch them again. And it doubles as a history of the chanbara (sword fighting) genre, providing an opportunity to sample clips from seldom-seen or partially lost silent films.
  91. The History of Sound
    The History of Sound doesn’t trust its own gentleness, and the inertia of the filmmaking gives the whole affair a detached, try-hard feeling.
  92. The Long Dumb Road
    The leads’ chemistry nearly redeems this shopworn setup, and the movie is at its best when it simply chills out with them.
  93. Fast Food Nation
    It's a mirror and a portrait, and a movie as necessary and nourishing as your next meal.
  94. District 13: Ultimatum
    It’s pleasurable nonsense and another reminder that one of the great pulls of cinema is the spectacle of other bodies in blissful motion.
  95. Michael
    This coldly compelling film doesn't try to explain Michael's behavior or analyze his disease. As if doing penance for Michael's sins, it eventually metes out unequivocal punishment, but it is small consolation.
  96. The Salvation
    This is, it’s worth remembering, a movie set in the American West that was shot in South Africa by a Danish director with a Danish star. In other words it’s another dream of America, feverish, lovely and absurd.
  97. Serial Mom
    Mr. Waters, of course, no longer traffics in the truly vulgar, as he did in early films like Pink Flamingos. With Serial Mom he concocts a cute suburban satire, a warmly funny movie that even a mother could love.
  98. Film Socialisme
    In typical Godardian fashion the film manages to be both strident and elusive, argumentative and opaque.
  99. To the End
    Lears clearly feels earnest sympathy for her subjects and passion for their cause, but the film often replicates for viewers the same atmosphere of hopelessness that makes climate activism a hard sell for voters.
  100. Synchronic
    Moorhead and Benson don’t overlook the more amusing aspects of the scenario . . . . And the duo deliver shocks, scares and a resonant payoff.
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