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. Cemetery
    Cemetery is primarily a slow and lovingly detailed immersion in the sights and sounds of the jungle and the mahout’s devoted attention to his animal.
  2. The Twentieth Century
    Is it all a bit much? Sure, but the self-consciousness is baked in: Rankin names one public gathering place “Disappointment Square.”
  3. A Bridge Too Far
    The movie is massive, shapeless, often unexpectedly moving, confusing, sad, vivid and very, very long.
  4. Cuba
    Though a lot of the dialogue would seem absurd even on daytime soap opera, the movie keeps coming up with scenes so arresting or eccentric you are aware of the wicked intelligence behind them.
  5. Markie in Milwaukee
    If Markie is undeniably compelling as a subject, the film doesn’t quite match her bravery and her willingness to explore uncharted territory. There are plenty of fly-on-the-wall observations, but little play or introspection besides what Markie is able to offer.
  6. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
    Grooving through the decades, this entertaining documentary aspires to prove that the Bee Gees were more than a hitmaker for disco nightclubs. Rather, Barry, Maurice and Robin were master songwriters and chameleons, continually reinventing themselves to harmonize with the times.
  7. Overseas
    With a fly-on-the-wall approach, the movie allows the center’s cruel contradictions to accumulate with a slow burn.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Three Godfathers
    The Three Godfathers succeeds in catching the spirit of the Westerns of two decades back, when bad men could be heroes too.
  9. It Happened on Fifth Avenue
    They took that dog-earred story of the hard-hearted millionaire given a lesson in human relations by a kindly disposed vagabond and they dressed it up in such trimmings as to make it look almost fresh. And they found themselves fortunately supported by a charming performance from Victor Moore.
  10. The Dig
    To its credit, this consistently interesting and at times engrossing picture declines to strike any of its notes with a hammer. Trading on the great British art of understatement, it’s scrupulous, sober, and tasteful throughout.
  11. Room for One More
    Room for One More makes for generally appealing movie fare. So long as this anecdotal look-in upon the experience of a husband and wife in bringing up two foster children, as well as three of their own, sticks simply to the humorous complications that arise in a house full of kids, plus appropriate livestock and paraphernalia, it has genuine gaiety and domestic charm.
  12. Young Man with a Horn
    If you have a sneaking affection for 1950-ish, made-to-measure movies, there are pleasures to be found in Young Man With a Horn.
  13. Period of Adjustment
    Isobel Lennart's screenplay adds a few mild embellishments and George Roy Hill has directed in a nice, clear, uncomplicated way.
  14. Baby God
    Olson’s poetic b-roll and Will Epstein’s soft, pulsing piano score buff away the lurid shocks.
  15. The Weasel's Tale
    The Grand Guignol conclusion does fulfill the flair promised by the film’s tuned-up colors and by Mara’s vintage posters for her movies, which have glorious titles like “The Other Woman Forever.”
  16. Cowboys
    The observant nature of this character drama offers Zahn in particular the opportunity to expand into new territory. He hasn’t lost the spaciness that once made him a lovable comedic sidekick, but here fatherhood endows that same charm with pathos, even tragedy.
  17. Playing by Heart
    For all its artificiality, Playing by Heart percolates with an earnest charm.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hannie Caulder
    Hannie Caulder, which begins cruel and comic, gradually becomes gentler and more serious; and by the time its spirit of outrage has subsided into something like elegy, the film has turned into a fairly moving study of what it means to be cursed by having to pursue a mission instead of a life.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fantastic Planet
    This is highly engrossing science-fiction, a French-Czechoslovak co-production in animation.
  21. Godspell
    I like its music, its drive and its determination, even when it's pretending to a kind of innocence and naiveté that I never for a second believe.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Iceman Cometh
    The play is an inescapably great experience, and that fact isn't muffled by this film.
  23. Mistress
    Mistress abounds with sharp comic performances that never stray into caricature or sentimentality.
  24. Hot Shots! Part Deux
    Deliciously silly.
  25. Beautiful Something Left Behind
    It could be argued that the film needed a little more documentary-style explanation about how the facility works — how long children stay, the goals of the treatment, and so on. But ultimately, Philp can’t be blamed for stressing emotional engagement over exposition.
  26. The Human Factor
    The Human Factor presents a cogent and involving view of the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, mainly from 1991 until the end of Bill Clinton’s first term, told through the recollections of United States negotiators charged with brokering a peace.
  27. Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
    An enjoyably hokey, big-budget theatrical film with a lot of kicks and the soul of a television movie. It's exactly what it announces itself to be and won't offend (or surprise) anyone...Although "Dragon" has few surprises, it is an entertainingly predictable enterprise.
  28. Sheena: Queen of the Jungle
    Sheena is the perfect summer movie for anyone who's dissatisfied with the season's intentional comedies, and who doesn't believe in looking a gift horse in the mouth. Actually, it's more like gift zebra.
  29. 'Til Kingdom Come
    Zinshtein’s patient, observant approach catches her subjects in moments of damning irony.
  30. Popcorn
    A horror film that is less mindless than most in that it is both funny and gross.
  31. 1982
    Working with a shrewdly limited setting, Mouaness skillfully gives the film a near-real-time feel, conveying a sense that the war is approaching through small-scale details like radio broadcasts, Wissam’s observation that pigeons have flown unusually close to the school and the volume and frequency of aerial noise.
  32. So I Married an Axe Murderer
    It comes as a welcome surprise that "So I Married an Axe Murderer," which might have been nothing more than a by-the-numbers star vehicle, surrounds Mr. Myers with amusing cameos and gives him a chance to do more than just coast.
  33. Bitter Moon
    Bitter Moon is, by any reasonable standard, just awful. It's smutty, far-fetched and bizarrely acted, especially by Ms. Seigner, who gives the kind of performance that can only be explained by the fact that she is the director's wife. The good news: Mr. Polanski seems to know all this, and even to encourage it. This material obviously appeals to his sense of mischief, which remains alive and well.
  34. CODA
    The template of CODA — the title is also a term used to describe the hearing children of deaf adults — might be wearyingly familiar, but this warmhearted drama from Sian Heder opens up space for concerns that feel fresh.
  35. How It Ends
    The film plays as a series of perfectly enjoyable sketches strung together, an excuse for veteran actors to chew on playful dialogue.
  36. Jockey
    The light is beautiful in Jockey, an enjoyable old-warrior movie with a surprising sting, even if the bones and story are creaky.
  37. Mass
    The movie lacks the gut punch of live theater, the thrill or discomfort of watching people show their feelings in real time. But as cinema, it demonstrates the effectiveness of simplicity. A well-written script and an exemplary cast can still produce a movie worth watching.
  38. El Planeta
    This is a dry comedy that elicits amused recognition rather than belly laughs, and Ulman, as a first-time feature director, makes canny decisions to set a wry tone.
  39. Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street
    Even those resistant to easy nostalgia will find plenty to think about.
  40. Cusp
    A portrait of modern girlhood, this documentary ultimately becomes a bleak look at the normalization of sexual abuse among the very victimized young women.
  41. First Date
    What follows is a barrage of gunfire, wah-wah guitars and a surprising amount of novelty and heart for a film that can feel as if it’s a road trip through the directors’ inspirations.
  42. We're All Going to the World's Fair
    In the tradition of internet science fiction, “World’s Fair” teases the boundary between the actual and the virtual, though in a frame of mind that is quietly ruminative rather than wildly speculative.
  43. Keep an Eye Out
    Dupieux pulls off this bizarre procedural in a lean running time while hitting the notes of darkness and drollery just right.
  44. Warlock
    Warlock is unexpectedly entertaining, having been concocted with comic imagination by D. T. Twohy, who wrote the screenplay, and Steve Miner, the director.
  45. Gremlins 2: The New Batch
    Gremlins 2: The New Batch speaks to the gleeful hell-raising monster in each of us, and it speaks with much more verve, cleverness and good humor than the film on which it is based. Add this to the very short list of sequels that neatly surpass their predecessors.
  46. There Is No I in Threesome
    As our central couple’s connection falters, the documentary evolves into an astute examination of perspective.
  47. Lapsis
    The narrative eventually loses steam, but the movie’s politics remain as low-key as its acting and as basic as its special effects. Lapsis isn’t a polemic, it’s a caricature, and all the more likable for having its claws sheathed in velvet.
  48. Twilight's Kiss
    Handsomely shot but humble in approach, the film can often feel purposeful, laying down groundwork that other stories of queer experience might take for granted. But Tai Bo’s pragmatic momentum as Pak has a way of restoring a succinctness to the movie, which avoids minimizing or exploiting the pains of concealment.
  49. Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell
    Maybe half of the film is about his music career, and of that, not much at all is devoted to his commercial prime. This makes the film anti-mythological, but also far more robust.
  50. Sin
    An austere, demanding sit, Sin — a Russian-Italian coproduction with Italian dialogue — nevertheless has a stubborn integrity in exploring the competing forces of patronage and creative inspiration that Michelangelo confronted in the 16th century.
    • 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.
  52. Arizona Dream
    Arizona Dream is enjoyably adrift, a wildly off-the-wall reverie. It's more than a fish out of water.
  53. Undercover Blues
    A most genial surprise, a comic update of cold war espionage movies that, because of the New Orleans location, has the enhanced charm of a stolen holiday...This movie is a breeze.
  54. Shoplifters of the World
    This sweetly nostalgic look at lost boys and lonely girls feels like it comes straight from the heart.
  55. Shoot to Kill
    This is essentially a formula film, and as such it's nothing fancy. But it has crisp, spare direction, enormous momentum and a story full of twists and turns. For anyone who thinks they don't make spine-tingling detective films the way they used to, good news: they've just made another.
  56. Come True
    Like “Our House” (2018), Burns’s underseen feature debut, Come True is superior throwback horror marred mainly by familiarity and, in this case, an ending that feels like a tease.
  57. Avalon
    A generous and touching film that is essentially smaller than its own sweeping ambitions, a crowded and skillfully drawn landscape from which no oversize figures emerge. Affection and memory are the forces that give Avalon its vibrancy, but they are also its limitations.
  58. My Donkey, My Lover & I
    My Donkey, My Lover & I is yet another story about a woman who ventures out into the wild and finds herself. But to the writer and director Caroline Vignal’s credit, this low-key romantic French comedy proves friskier and more idiosyncratic than its reliance on this trope of feminist empowerment would suggest.
  59. To Catch a Thief
    To Catch a Thief does nothing but give out a good, exciting time.
  60. A Cop Movie
    Ambitious, heady and distinctive, if easier to admire in theory than engage with moment to moment, A Cop Movie has a conceptual strangeness that’s difficult to overstate.
  61. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
    Pleasing, exasperating, poignant and coy, “What Do We See” is a loose, exceedingly leisurely meander through a series of momentous and banal moments that take place during an amble through the Georgian city of Kutaisi.
  62. She's So Lovely
    The beat-up poetry, soused look and bad habits of She's So Lovely are often dated. The showy bravado is not.
  63. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    The director Tom Gormican, who wrote the script with Kevin Etten, gets the job done, churning the nonsense. There are no surprises other than the movie is watchable and amusing, though it’s too bad Gormican didn’t let Cage and Pascal just go with the absurdist, shambolic flow.
  64. Groomed
    Van de Pas calls on experts, psychologists and a convicted sex offender for interviews, but the most illuminating examples come from her own story.
  65. The Good Traitor
    Rosendahl’s framing complicates any “great man” narrative of the period, and shows how the energies of public and private worlds course back and forth.
  66. Heavenly Creatures
    Stylish and eerily compelling before it overplays its campy excesses, Heavenly Creatures does have a feverish intensity to recommend it.
  67. Four Good Days
    As a relationship movie, not just for the pair but those around them, Four Good Days is more complex than its outward trappings and preachier scenes — like an anguished Molly addressing a high school class — suggest.
  68. Moffie
    In depicting the horrific specifics of this particular man’s awful military experience, Hermanus delivers in abundance.
  69. Sexual Drive
    Consistently intriguing and occasionally hilarious, the movie does not depict sex itself. Instead, the characters eat food items that become objects of titillation, lust and pleasure: the sticky goo around soybeans, chili oil sizzling in a wok.
  70. Consenting Adults
    Still, watching the plot unfold remains fun, if only for its "Can you top this?" brand of craziness.
  71. Introducing, Selma Blair
    The greatest asset of the film is its ability to simulate the intimacy of disclosure, and Blair’s comfort with the camera — her actress-y will to entertain — makes her a uniquely endearing subject.
  72. Fortress
    For all its faults, Fortress has an unusually energetic imagination. At its best, it blends "Robocop," "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Brave New World" into something scary, original and grimly amusing.
  73. Riders of Justice
    In the end, Jensen opts for feel-good fantasy over hardened truths, but his dizzyingly chaotic methods amount to a dynamic, unexpectedly touching ode to the difficulties of baring your vulnerabilities to genuinely overcome them.
  74. Not Going Quietly
    It is a warm and generous portrait, but the film lacks its central organizer’s propulsive shrewdness.
  75. Wrath of Man
    Ritchie reveals crucial story points with clever time-juggling editing, and keeps up the tension well into the movie’s climax, which delivers exactly what the viewer will have come to hope for.
  76. My Favorite Year
    A funny and good-natured comedy that marks the directing debut of Richard Benjamin. Mr. Benjamin works in a steady, affable style that is occasionally inspired, always snappy and never less than amusing.
  77. White Hunter Black Heart
    This material marks a gutsy, fascinating departure for Mr. Eastwood, and makes it clear that his directorial ambitions have by now outstripped his goals as an actor.
  78. The Place That Makes Us
    The families’ stories help turn The Place That Makes Us into more than a policy proposal in motion.
  79. Wet Season
    Wei Lun comes off as one-dimensional in his brash, immature pursuit of Ling, yet their illicit relationship is portrayed in an anti-sensationalist light, blurring the lines between maternal and romantic love.
  80. The Snows of Kilimanjaro
    Thanks to a skillful combination of some sensational African hunting scenes, a musical score of rich suggestion and a vivid performance by Gregory Peck, Twentieth Century-Fox and Darryl F. Zanuck have concocted a handsome and generally absorbing film in The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
  81. The Djinn
    The film betrays its own less-is-more philosophy and becomes weighed down by exposition — but it’s a tense, thrilling ride nonetheless.
  82. Future People: The Family of Donor 5114
    Although Future People struggles to break through to the kids, an engaging family portrait emerges nonetheless — of a group clustered by biology, but bonded by a singular shared experience.
  83. In Our Mothers' Gardens
    As a director, Lewis is admirably present. She seems to have gained the trust of her interview subjects, and has taken care to create a space for openness.
  84. Cliff Walkers
    The numerous action set pieces would be memorable even if the plot points didn’t eventually fall into place, which they do.
  85. Of Mice and Men
    Yet for all its evident talent, Of Mice and Men is not very exciting. It could be that looking back at Lennie and George with the perspective of time robs them of their urgency. There's no surprise left.
  86. No Ordinary Man
    This is a respectful tribute that is a shade too morally and cinematically safe in its execution.
  87. Ruby in Paradise
    Ruby in Paradise is more often pensive than genuinely thoughtful, but it is helped immensely by Ms. Judd's gravity and strength.
  88. Downstream to Kinshasa
    The film sometimes flags in energy as it cuts between these different strands, but its pace feels faithful to just how halting the fight for justice can be when democracy becomes impenetrable to those it serves.
  89. Plan B
    The movie doesn’t make a joke of Sunny and Lupe’s concerns about pregnancy, dating and parental expectations, and in turn, it’s a delight to laugh through their goofier exploits.
  90. Spring Blossom
    Lindon stages an intentional anticlimax that feels confusingly abrupt and unconvincing. Yet her point is well taken: that the desires of young people are as fickle and ephemeral as flowers in full bloom.
  91. Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation
    the connections drawn in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation are sufficiently instructive that watching and listening to these writers is also, in a way, like hearing one author in stereo.
  92. Fanny: The Right to Rock
    What the movie showcases best from its subjects, then, is the humor and ease of women who have survived a lifetime of setbacks and strife. Fanny has already proven itself — what’s left is for us to enjoy its growing catalog.
  93. Sisters with Transistors
    This film is informative and often fascinating.
  94. Licorice Pizza
    A shaggy, fitfully brilliant romp from Paul Thomas Anderson.
  95. Tu Me Manques
    Though the movie’s aesthetics are tepidly pleasant, Bellott’s biggest success is freeing his film’s relationship to time. In this sense, the movie retains some of the vitality of theater, where the characters invite the audience into reverie.
  96. Rock Bottom Riser
    The film is sometimes hard to follow, because the connection between the images and the voice-overs is not always clear. But taken as a whole, Rock Bottom Riser leaves viewers with a strong sense of how native Hawaiians view themselves and their future, and encourages inquiry into how their land might be preserved.
  97. The Paper Tigers
    Bao’s lighthearted, refreshing approach neither succumbs to whitewashing nor the model-minority myth. The film sticks to the action-comedy basics, which is just fine.
  98. Holler
    Riegel has said that Ruth’s story was inspired by her own challenges leaving the area. Even the medium — Super 16-millimeter film, in the era of digital — adds to the ambience of rusting, abandoned machinery.
  99. All Light, Everywhere
    In a manner that is patient — and sometimes even playful — rather than polemical, “All Light, Everywhere” contributes to debates about crime, policing, racism and accountability.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Man Who Knew Too Much
    Although the photography and lighting are inferior according to Hollywood standards, the film is an interesting example of technical ingenuity as well as an absorbing melodrama.
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