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. Only the Lonely
    Thanks in large part to Mr. Candy, who gives an honestly touching performance in what might have been a cloying role, this story does have its simple charms.
  2. Los Hermanos/The Brothers
    A moving documentary with generous amounts of music.
  3. The Indian Runner
    Loose, rambling and sometimes rudderless as it is, The Indian Runner has a fundamental honesty that gives it real substance.
  4. Let Us In
    The film’s derivativeness — residents literally fight darkness with light — is countered by strong acting from the two leads and a director who just might be having the time of his life. That apparent delight seeps into almost every frame, giving the film a guileless warmth that drew my good will.
  5. The Phantom
    Adapting research that is, by now, hardly breaking news, Forbes has some solid strategies for making the material cinematic.
  6. Wilde
    Fry's warmly sympathetic performance finds the gentleness beneath the wit. He conveys the sense of a man at the mercy of forces he cannot control, not least of them his own brittle genius.
  7. Love Jones
    Slinky, sexy Love Jones brings new life to an old story: a courtship and all its predictable detours on the road to romance, with a boy-meets-girl inexorability along the way to love.
  8. Fathom
    At times, the doc feels like science-fiction without the fiction. Swap whales for aliens and these two doctors aglow with the thrill of discovery could double for Jodie Foster in “Contact” or Amy Adams in “Arrival.”
  9. A Crime on the Bayou
    in covering the repercussions of the branching cases, A Crime on the Bayou shows how superficially straightforward, courageous acts — like refusing to plead guilty unjustly or defending the unjustly accused — are hard.
  10. The Meaning of Hitler
    The Meaning of Hitler takes a multifaceted, often counterintuitive approach to examining the underpinnings of fascism.
  11. Queen of Glory
    The child of Ghanaian parents herself, Mensah traverses the polyglot turf well, infusing details with astute affection and understated laughs. Even the occasional slapstick proves more sweet than silly.
  12. India Sweets and Spices
    Without sacrificing comedic buoyancy, Malik and her ensemble make palpable a community that is vibrant and claustrophobic.
  13. Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James
    The movie wants the viewer to believe that James didn’t have it easy — and he didn’t. But it can’t skate over the aberrant actions that led to his imprisonment. “Bitchin’” is fascinating and troubling viewing.
  14. A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks
    Perhaps no one documentary can do justice to Parks. But “Choice of Weapons” ends up streamlining his complexity, and its wind-down looks past his other audiovisual output.
  15. LFG
    Both films are conventional in cinematic style, and they constitute the kind of feel-good entertainment that is easy to recommend. But what is timely and interesting — even thorny — about these films is their focus on the economic opportunities generated by athletic achievement
  16. The Price of Freedom
    Muckraking documentaries often conclude with declined-to-comment disclaimers, but David Keene, a former N.R.A. president, is here. Toward the end, he chillingly cautions anyone who thinks the N.R.A. might disappear.
  17. The Legend of the Underground
    The filmmakers Giselle Bailey and Nneka Onuorah capture arguments as other activists wrestle with the contradictions of James’s motivations. But crucially, they don’t shy away from James.
  18. Sisters on Track
    Both films are conventional in cinematic style, and they constitute the kind of feel-good entertainment that is easy to recommend. But what is timely and interesting — even thorny — about these films is their focus on the economic opportunities generated by athletic achievement
  19. Outrageous Fortune
    It works because Miss Midler and Miss Long are hilarious, both separately and together. Another thing that works is Leslie Dixon's screenplay, which has energy, wit and a supreme confidence that's just this side of bluster.
  20. The Mercy of the Jungle
    The film’s palpably-rendered environment, with stiflingly dense foliage and vivid natural soundscapes, heightens the dizzying nature of the war without resorting to titillation or idealized images that might glorify pain and suffering.
  21. Cow
    We somehow feel connected to these animals — not by their precious, humanlike relatability — but by the cyclically banal and thorough means with which they are exploited, milked and bred on aggressive schedules that break their bodies down prematurely.
  22. Casablanca Beats
    Hip-hop isn’t dead, the film energetically insists; it’s just been hiding in a Moroccan slum.
  23. The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52
    Neither slick nor propulsive, The Loneliest Whale gently combines aquatic adventure and bobbing meditation on our own species’s environmental arrogance.
  24. The One and Only Dick Gregory
    By covering so much ground, it doesn’t have room to dig too deep. But along with some very funny footage of a master of his craft, it offers a convincing argument that while Gregory became famous for his comedy, what made him such a riveting cultural figure is what he did after he left it behind.
  25. Working Girls
    Working Girls, though a work of fiction, sounds as authentic as might a documentary about coal miners. The camera attends to the duties of the ''girls'' without apparent emotional response.
  26. Sweet Thing
    Rockwell intentionally reminds his audience of the rich history of American independent cinema, where filmmakers across decades have built dreamscapes out of the textures of everyday interactions.
  27. Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide
    Scharf’s stories of meeting up with Haring (they were roommates for some time) are evocative and moving.
  28. Wildland
    So committed to maintaining an enigmatically sinister atmosphere, the film fails to build out the many compelling issues it raises about toxic masculinity and familial gaslighting. Nevertheless, some inspired confrontations, and a commanding performance by Sidse Babett Knudsen, who plays the hot-and-cold matriarch, Bodil, makes “Wildland” an absorbing and highly watchable psychodrama.
  29. The Big Scary 'S' Word
    Hope is not a policy, as the saying goes, so Bridge gamely tries to provide both, fleshing out ideals with examples.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Let It Be
    The very helter‐skelter, unstudied nature of the picture provides a revealing close‐up of the world's most famous quartet, playing, relaxing and chatting.
  31. Prayers for the Stolen
    The film swings back and forth from scenes of pastoral bliss to brutality, generating a narrative that, while unfocused, is nevertheless anchored by the tender and wounded performances by its adolescent cast.
  32. Clockwatchers
    Clockwatchers gets many of the details of office life eerily right: the arrogant, smarmy male executives who affect a patronizing jocularity with secretaries whose names they can never remember; the iron-fisted boss who huffs windily about everyone in the company being a "family"; the petty tyrant who doles out pencils as though they were gold bullion.
  33. My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To
    This may be dark fodder for a family project, but the result is a visually striking meditation on obligation and complicity.
  34. Lourdes
    The movie also shows the volunteers and health care workers who look after the pilgrims during the devotional season. The movie allows these figures moments of frankness — there’s much about their jobs that’s tiring and unappetizing — but the viewer will be mostly impressed by their compassion.
  35. Searching for Mr. Rugoff
    As someone who grew up going to some of the theaters Rugoff once ran — which included Cinema I and II and the Beekman, among others — I got the warm-and-fuzzies from seeing the love here for moviegoing and exhibition, which he goosed with gonzo showmanship.
  36. East of the Mountains
    In a star’s turn, Skerritt reveals the tiniest fissures of vulnerability in his unfaltering portrayal of a cardiologist who is ailing and grieving — and fed up with both.
  37. The Best Intentions
    For a time, The Best Intentions captures the elements of a profoundly difficult and credible love story, one plagued by essential differences that cannot be resolved.
  38. 915: Hunting Hispanics
    The value of this demystifying film is its tactical breakdown of a form of violence that has become increasingly common in the United States. Here, both prevention and survival are a result of communal strategy.
  39. Pray Away
    The harms conversion therapy causes, and the tactics it uses, aren’t news at this point, and Pray Away is more interesting when it focuses on how most of its subjects eventually embraced gay and bisexual identities despite having formerly been so public in their homophobia. Some shifts weren’t long ago.
  40. The Valet
    The Valet is an earnest crowd pleaser that unabashedly celebrates the bonds of a Latino family in a tight-knit neighborhood with rom-com aplomb.
  41. Val
    More a self-portrait than a profile, Val tells the story of a Hollywood career with a candor that stops short of revelation. The tone is personal but not quite intimate, producing in the viewer a warm, slightly wary feeling of companionship.
  42. The Story of Film: A New Generation
    Cousins’s assessments offer plenty to argue with, but it’s possible to enjoy “A New Generation” without agreeing that “Booksmart” “extends the world of film comedy,” as he claims, or that a shot in “It Follows” merits comparison to the camerawork in Michael Snow’s landmark experimental film “La Région Centrale.”
  43. The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)
    The movie reflects upon how people organize experience through our memories and our actions, but the filmmakers also have a self-awareness about their steadfast methods.
  44. Deception
    True, its hero is a philandering middle-aged novelist; he has an affair with a divine younger woman; and there’s even an imaginary trial where said novelist stands before a jury of women accusing him of misogyny. But, if you can tolerate these passé indulgences, there’s also something slyly compelling about this ethereal, pillow-talk-heavy drama.
  45. Homeroom
    Like a diploma, it’s easy to imagine how the rewards of this carefully observed documentary could accrue with a little time.
  46. The Velvet Queen
    The movie operates on two basic levels. One is philosophical, as the camera watches two men who are themselves looking through viewfinders experience the sensations of a place where humans rarely disrupt the natural order.
  47. White as Snow
    As satisfying as Huppert is, the movie dances on the pinpoint of de Laâge’s performance. The name Claire signifies light and clarity, and there’s a transparency to de Laâge’s portrayal of this innocent who remains thus while discovering a lavish sensuality.
  48. The New Bauhaus
    It is a good primer, well illustrated.
  49. Under the Volcano
    Almost 40 years later, it’s hilarious to see Stewart Copeland speak of Sting with still-fresh feelings of exasperation, irritation and admiration. Fans of Elton John will find the manic work ethic he applied to the album “Too Low for Zero” fascinating.
  50. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
    It is firmly directed by John Sturges (of Bad Day at Black Rock fame), and it is ruggedly acted by all and sundry—of which there is quit[e] a heap.
  51. French Postcards
    Parts of French Postcards have considerable charm, even if it is charm with the consistency of bunny-fluff.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Sons of Katie Elder
    A good, tough, unpretentious and gory little Western with a professional stamp and a laconic bite.
  53. Official Competition
    In the end, this is a one-joke movie — a shaggy-dog meta-narrative — but it’s not a bad joke.
  54. Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles
    Despite the modern technology, the setting and the sound draws attention to what is retro about this young star’s style, the influences from bossa nova, jazz, and traditional choral music that pop up in her chart-topping records.
  55. The Mad Women's Ball
    Laurent has made an elegant if overheated melodrama that amplifies the villainy of Charcot and his colleagues (one proves particularly appalling) to underscore how male-centered the medical establishment was — and is.
  56. What We Left Unfinished
    Ghani’s mode is less interrogative than associative. Her montage of film fragments illustrates and sometimes poetically belies the interviewees’ recollections, evoking the ambiguous and unresolved contours of collective memory.
  57. Limbo
    If this oddly structured film feels like two short stories stuck together, there is enough solid glue joining them that they resonate off one another deeply.
  58. Rose
    In the closing scene, Saada, relying on a fierce bit of acting by Fabian, finds a way to pose the question directly to the audience of what Rose’s life should look like. The answer is clear.
  59. Usedom: A Clear View of the Sea
    Shaping personal and geographical history into sun-drenched dollops, the director Heinz Brinkmann fashions a charmingly quirky guide to his island home.
  60. The Wonder
    Anchored by Lelio’s intelligent filmmaking — and by Pugh’s beautifully calibrated mix of physical vigor and temperamental astringency — Lib embodies the story’s arguments, themes and power with vivid clarity. There’s no denying her or her ravenous hunger for life.
  61. Zeros and Ones
    Utterly baffling, yet never less than intriguing, Zeros and Ones lingers in the mind. Even after you think you’ve brushed it off, its chilly tendrils continue to cling.
  62. Eating
    Food assumes near-religious importance in Mr. Jaglom's portrait of needy, anxious women who spend an entire day playing upon one another's insecurities, and waxing rhapsodic about well-remembered culinary thrills.
  63. Nightbooks
    Its devotion to frights makes it memorable.
  64. Back to the Outback
    However generic this movie is in premise, there is wit to be found in its details, and warmth in its message.
  65. The Summit of the Gods
    On limited terms — capturing the physicality of mountain climbing within the ethereal medium of animation — The Summit of the Gods is distinctive.
  66. Julia
    Julia is an apt tribute to a life well-lived and well-fed.
  67. That's Entertainment, Part II
    Part 2 has been compiled with the kind of intelligence and affection that allow us to get some purchase on the Hollywood history made by M-G-M without spending our whole lives at the job.
  68. Wildhood
    The quiet candor with which Hannam addresses issues of masculinity, and how it intersects with an Indigenous and queer identity, elevates this otherwise conventional story.
  69. Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over
    Overall, “Don’t Make Me Over” gets the job done, albeit in a formulaic, straightforward fashion. But there’s pure joy in just seeing Warwick radiate the kind of charisma and grit you’d hope for from a living legend who has always stayed true to herself.
  70. Pocket Money
    A fragmented, far from‐great movie, and it won't change cinema history, but in its own odd fashion it celebrates humdrum lives without ever resorting to patronizing artifice.
  71. All My Puny Sorrows
    The ensemble builds believable chemistry as intimate family members, and when their characters deliver their arguments for life or death, the stakes feel appropriately high.
  72. Benediction
    The film never quite conjures a link between the life and the work.
  73. Are You Lonesome Tonight?
    Part exploration of the ravages of guilt, part homage to the stylish Hong Kong gangster flicks of the 1990s, “Lonesome” (written by Wen with Noé Dodson, Wang Yinuo and Zhao Binghao) wears its influences on its sleeve but is a cool and sophisticated debut feature.
  74. Montana Story
    When Montana Story works, you are effortlessly drawn into a world — which allows you to go with the easygoing, realist groove — even as you’re taking stock of the artifice and waiting for the hammer to fall.
  75. Swan Song
    Any mind-bending conceit or special effect pales before Ali’s incredibly fine-tuned talents.
  76. Love at First Bite
    Mr. Hamilton's knack for comedy has been a well-kept secret until now, but he's certainly funny in Love at First Bite, a coarse, delightful little movie with a bang-up cast and no pretensions at all.
  77. Golden Voices
    Job tensions hammer at the fault lines of the couple’s marriage, but the movie maintains an understated “I love ya, tomorrow” tone. A pleasant sit — the kind of picture that’s moving, but not too moving.
  78. Los Últimos Frikis
    The film’s enduring hook is the spectacle of a self-proclaimed revolutionary government that can’t abide the rebellion of rock without bureaucratic oversight.
  79. Becoming Cousteau
    It’s a swift-moving, detailed biography, recounting a life that was long, eventful and stippled with tragedy and regret.
  80. Inu-oh
    Even as Yuasa’s approach changes from section to section — as he plays with texture, volume and hue and gently shifts the balance between the figurative and the abstract — his extraordinary touch remains evident in each line and in every eye-popping swirl.
  81. Costa Brava, Lebanon
    If a fuller sense of their humanity is sometimes lost to the ideas they serve, Akl has nonetheless produced a smart and sensitive film.
  82. Saloum
    Punctuated by Gregory Corandi’s gliding, God’s-eye shots of meringue-colored desert and placid shoreline, Saloum has the extravagance of fable and folklore. The plot is ludicrously jam-packed, but the pace is fleet and the dialogue has wit and a carefree bounce.
  83. The Wheel
    The story ends with an ambitiously staged sequence that reaches for another level of feeling, but it’s hard for anything to match the bruising depiction of Albee and Walker’s rough road to that point.
  84. Black as Night
    The special effects are fine, if unremarkable, but the actors are into it and the script manages to be thoughtful without dampening the fun.
  85. The People We Hate at the Wedding
    Underneath the plentiful high jinks in its physical-comedy-heavy scenes, The People We Hate at the Wedding ends up being a poignant enough good time that celebrates imperfect yet endearing familial love.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Guns of Navarone
    Even though the picture runs more than two hours and a half, it moves swiftly and gets where it is going. J. Lee Thompson has directed it with pace and has seen to it that the actors give the impression of being stout and bold.
  87. The Black Phone
    In place of gouting gore and surging fright, this enjoyable adaptation of Joe Hill’s 2005 short story has an almost contemplative tone, one that drains its familiar horror tropes — a masked psychopath, communications from beyond the grave — of much of their chill. The movie’s low goose bump count, though, is far from ruinous.
  88. The Harvey Girls
    It may be a rather lofty tribute to Fred Harvey's girls, but it's a show.
  89. Sweetheart
    To the film’s credit, the central relationship remains realistically drawn — a teenage courtship that’s marked by misunderstandings and mood swings. The characters aren’t always sweet, but they never feel phony.
  90. Bulletproof
    What this admirably hands-off film shows is how the feelings of anxiety that have surrounded school shootings have been monetized and translated into demand for consumer products. It is a nightmarish vision — the military industrial complex deployed in the halls where children ought to roam.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dead & Buried
    Fairly standard and cynical stuff, with enough threatening incidents to satisfy the most jaded horror-film buff.
  92. Held for Ransom
    Should you be willing to overlook certain intrinsic difficulties, Held for Ransom is a surprisingly thoughtful hostage drama given the blunt meatheadedness of its title.
  93. All About My Sisters
    A film bristling with the kind of familial rancor that usually only emerges behind closed doors.
  94. Bull
    The film’s rejiggered timeline is a little hard to follow, but the climax swings for the fences and shows an unashamed verve for tale-telling that warms the cockles.
  95. How They Got Over
    With a trove of archival performance footage, much of it from the television show TV Gospel Time, and the wisdom to let those images breathe, the film leans into the maxim about showing not telling.
  96. The Phantom of the Open
    A different actor than Rylance might have revealed the slight darker, impostor wrinkles of the tale. Instead, his character, an unflummoxed optimist, shares some of the same cheery qualities as Ted Lasso.
  97. Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen
    Here the now-elders seem delighted to make a joyful noise with the generations they influenced.
  98. Warning
    Together, these tales feel like the hangover at a wake for mankind. The film’s dusky pastel color palette recalls dying flowers on a grave. Yet, even as the synth score mutters anxiously in the background, Alexander takes a prankish delight in her own doom and gloom.
  99. Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson
    In place of narrative drive it relies, on the momentum created by ‐ its visual spectacle, its prodigal way with ideas, its wit and its enthusiasm for the lunatic business of making movies.
  100. Flesh and Bone
    Most of what keeps Flesh and Bone so gripping is the ways in which the characters themselves evolve.
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