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. She's the One
    This time, he takes no great risks, nor does he break new ground in the 20-something serial-small-talk genre. (Currently, Nicole Holofcener's sprightly "Walking and Talking" does it better.) But Burns emphatically avoids sophomore slump with an inviting, ruefully funny film that lives up to his initial promise.
  2. M3GAN
    The director Gerard Johnstone doesn’t go for elaborate suspense sequences or truly intense scares. He wants to please, not rattle. And while there are some hints at social commentary on how modern mothers and fathers use technology to outsource parenting, this movie is smart enough to never take itself too seriously.
  3. Since I Been Down
    “We’ve caused pain,” that inmate says, “primarily ’cause we were in pain.” Far from seeming like an excuse, in Since I Been Down, this observation sounds like a way toward reckoning and change.
  4. Cairo Conspiracy
    Cairo Conspiracy is a measured but unsparing portrait of corruption perpetrated by people who, across the board, are utterly confident of their own rectitude. Its denouement offers some mercy, but zero hope that the rot depicted can be corrected.
  5. Beauty
    Consider Beauty an elegy with an edge, one that touches on faith and financials, love and condemnation.
  6. Private Desert
    Muritiba understands that any portrait of masculinity that fixates too intensely on the cruelties and self-denials of machista culture are futile. Instead, he finds grace in stolen moments of tenderness.
  7. Close
    The roteness of the film’s second half — reinforced by Valentin Hadjadj’s over-insistent score — can’t dispel the exquisite insight of its earlier scenes or the heart-rending precision of the performances.
  8. More Than Ever
    Directed by Emily Atif, this middlebrow drama showcases Krieps’s captivating blend of melancholic fragility and spiky tenacity, riding on the strength of its performers, including the Gaspard Ulliel in his final live-action role before his accidental death in 2022.
  9. Sick of Myself
    Each time we think Signe has hit her breaking point, she perseveres. It’s deadpan funny at first, but then gets disturbing. Her refusal to give up the act proves to be more sickening than her physical symptoms.
  10. Godland
    Godland gestures at several intersecting themes — belief, the struggle to hold onto faith, the impermanence of being — with greater suggestiveness than depth. It’s a sharp, dryly funny, at times cruel exploration of human arrogance and frailty.
  11. Eat Drink Man Woman
    Its thoughts about its characters don't go much deeper than the bottom of a soup bowl, but those thoughts are still expressed with affection, wit and an abundance of fascinating cooking tips.
  12. Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel
    The film avoids providing too much context, a choice that contributes to the spectral atmosphere. The directors aren’t after a news piece; they’re just listening to voices that continue to echo in the corridors.
  13. Strange World
    The takeaway is the difficulty of collaboration in the face of entrenched beliefs and ways of navigating the world that, ultimately, must be questioned — if not entirely dismantled — if any one of us expects to stick around.
  14. Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes
    Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, directed by James Jones, does not extensively explore the history of its components. It’s less concerned with the tapes themselves than with the act of bearing witness.
  15. Mickey: The Story of a Mouse
    It’s boosterish and jam-packed, like many pop-culture documentaries (not just ones produced by Disney about Disney).
  16. Alone Together
    Its simplicity and lack of cinematic fancy strikes a tone of surprising relief.
  17. Vesper
    A wistful beauty and a delicately imaginative sense of craft set Vesper apart from most post-apocalyptic stories.
  18. Paddington In Peru
    It’s a somewhat rote exercise in soul-searching, and the script lacks subtlety. (At one point, a character actually says, “you have found yourself.”) But the experience is still a worthy one for our furry leading man.
  19. Stay Prayed Up
    As self-promotional ventures go, this is an effort of integrity and good will, and packs in a lot of spirited music that more or less sells itself.
  20. Sing, Dance, Act: Kabuki featuring Toma Ikuta
    Even for viewers with no relationship to Ikuta or his prior roles, “Sing, Dance, Act” provides a fascinating look into Kabuki theater and the particular sets of skills that are required to pull off such idiosyncratic performances.
  21. McEnroe
    There’s a lot more here for tennis fans than you get in average sports documentaries.
  22. The Story Won't Die
    If Gerson’s brisk supercut style can feel frustratingly cursory at times, he chooses wisely to concede the stage to the artists — rousing scenes from concerts and recitals are the film’s highlights — rather than turn them into data points for an exhaustive account of the refugee crisis.
  23. The Human Trial
    Shot largely in hospital waiting areas, offices and conference rooms, The Human Trial is not a visually dynamic movie. But it builds a good head of steam in the narrative intrigue department before resolving on a low-key note of hope.
  24. This Is Elvis
    This isn't a particularly well-made film, or even a truthful one - as a matter of fact, its fraudulence is its one uncompromising aspect. And yet it is mesmerizing, if not as a drama or documentary, then as an artifact.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Angels in the Outfield
    Clarence Brown, who produced and directed, and Dorothy Kingsley and George Wells, the scenarists, were, it is apparent, not interested in facts. But they make convincing and thoroughly charming the legends they wish to purvey.
  26. Sniper. The White Raven
    Like many other movies trailing a lone gunslinger, Sniper: The White Raven builds to a tense face-off, which for our hero comes to represent a small measure of justice.
  27. Doula
    The running time is too long, and the finale’s screaming too prolonged; but, unlike childbirth, this good-natured movie delivers a dry, funny and utterly painless experience.
  28. I Stand Alone
    The movie's triumph -- if that's what it is -- is in the force of its assault. It takes one man's unbearable truth and bashes us in the skull with it.
  29. See How They Run
    With a sprightly wit and an all-star cast to bring it to life, the movie manages to be a loving parody of theater gossips, postwar London and Christie’s murder mysteries all at once.
  30. Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero
    The “Dragon Ball” formula is repetitive and predictable. But it’s difficult to overstate how exquisitely gratifying that formula can be.
  31. Fair Play
    While its stylings, including perky music and cutesy graphics, can sometimes verge on trite, its insights and guidance are encouraging, actionable and necessary.
  32. Set It Off
    The action sequences deliver, as do the performances. You want these characters to make it, and their destinies are compelling to behold.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Fly
    Believe it or not, The Fly happens to be one of the better, more restrained entries of the "shock" school. As produced and directed by the late Kurt Neumann, with an earnest little cast headed by Al Hedison, Patricia Owens and Vincent Price, this is a quiet, uncluttered and even unpretentious picture, building up almost unbearable tension by simple suggestion.
  34. Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down
    Even during more analytic or crusading sections, the documentary’s mood never strays from inspirational.
  35. From Where They Stood
    His film can feel overly cerebral—a bit like being plunged into a seminar—and the text cards do a lot of explanatory heavy lifting. But Cognet’s forensic approach does insist on memorializing these events in an important, physically specific way and, intentionally or not, queasily anticipates a world without any living eyewitnesses to these horrors.
  36. The Reverend
    Canfield’s debut feature is infused with its own measure of that gentling spirit. It is also blessedly low on piousness.
  37. Skies of Lebanon
    The movie’s openheartedness eventually wins the day.
  38. Pearl
    There is some sex and plenty of gore, but mostly an atmosphere of feverish, lurid melodrama leavened with winks of knowing humor and held together by Goth’s utterly earnest and wondrously bizarre performance.
  39. The Swimmers
    The Swimmers tells this story as an inspirational (but rarely sugarcoated) crowd-pleaser. Within those terms, it hits its marks.
  40. Extreme Measures
    Brisk and unsettling.
  41. A Balance
    Takiuchi’s Yuko, in turns motherly and mercenary, is bewitchingly enigmatic: What drives her? Why does she still live with her father? Mercifully, we receive little back story; it’s enough that she is an ambitious woman, choked by ruthless double standards surrounding sex and autonomy.
  42. Emergency Declaration
    Emergency Declaration, a piercing thriller from the South Korean writer-director Han Jae-rim, manages to deliver excitement and melodrama out of a ludicrous story line.
  43. The Ghost and the Darkness
    The Ghost and the Darkness, a lion-hunting story set in 19th-century Africa, is the rare Hollywood action-adventure that becomes more surprising and exotic as it moves along. While it begins on an unpromisingly starchy note, the film soon picks up speed, color and nicely nonchalant humor as it tells a true story about near-mythic beasts.
  44. True Believer
    The film's view of Eddie Dodd is occasionally on the facile side, but Mr. Woods's performance is crackling and passionate enough to give the character depth despite that; it's also laced with snappish, self-mocking humor that Mr. Woods delivers particularly well. This performance is so razor-sharp that Eddie can be seen coming alive with each little triumph, reveling in each little maneuver and taking each little disappointment terribly hard. His enthusiasm is irresistible.
  45. Bones and All
    Bones and All is a ragged hybrid of genres and styles, an elevated exploitation movie, a succession of moods — anxious, horny, dreamy, sad — in search of a metaphor. Or maybe the metaphor is obvious.
  46. Argentina, 1985
    Cinema prizes a good man making history, but this story’s heroes are manifold.
  47. Something from Tiffany's
    It’s a winning setup, and the director, Daryl Wein, escalates the action shrewdly, with clever rom-com engineering.
  48. Late August, Early September
    If Assayas doesn't always transport his film's events beyond the all too commonplace, his understatement can also yield moments of quiet simplicity.
  49. Exposing Muybridge
    While starchy in presentation, Exposing Muybridge makes clear that its subject’s images still have a lot to show us.
  50. Cats Don't Dance
    While the animated characters, bright colors and an appealing Randy Newman score may keep the children content, Cats Don't Dance is no saccharine fantasy. Its Hollywood references and dark satire constitute its real strengths.
  51. Claydream
    Evans has made a lively and illuminating tribute, and not always an unduly flattering one.
  52. Bliss
    We tend to look at the sex lives of sex workers as endlessly fascinating, but in Bliss the line of work is instead part of a larger take on the hurdles of modern romance.
  53. Human Flowers of Flesh
    There is little story beyond the snatches of conversation we receive, but Human Flowers of Flesh brims with visual and aural detail from the rocky coasts and gurgling reefs.
  54. Do Revenge
    Do Revenge, directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, is a playful, sharp-fanged satire that feels like the ’90s teen comedy hammered into modern emojis: crown, knife, fire, winky face.
  55. End of the Road
    Even when the movie wants for tension, it brims with playful style.
  56. Free Puppies!
    The film achieves its goal in raising awareness for these volunteer efforts, casting a spotlight on a chronically overlooked crisis.
  57. Dalíland
    While Dalíland occasionally edges into caricature, its take on Gala’s role in the marriage, her temperament and feverish attention to money is happily more complicated.
  58. Kaepernick & America
    The verbal analysis here isn’t always profound — one interviewee trots out the banal phrase “the conversation we should be having” — but the narrative as presented in archival footage (Kaepernick did not sit for an interview for this film) is exemplary.
  59. The Redeem Team
    The movie, directed by Jon Weinbach, offers several eye-opening mini-narratives on the way to a rematch with Argentina.
  60. The Three Faces of Eve
    It is written, produced and directed by Mr. Johnson with a clean documentary clarity, and played with superlative flexibility and emotional power by Joanne Woodward in the main role.
  61. Evil Dead Rise
    Lee Cronin, who directed Evil Dead Rise with many more colors of bodily fluid, is a meticulous creator of stunning shots. His camera doesn’t move. It dances, shifting, spinning, occasionally knocked on its side like a running back in a collision.
  62. A Jazzman's Blues
    A Jazzman’s Blues is packed with outsize emotions, but also grand themes.
  63. Heathers: The Musical
    Despite these flashes of timidity and an overlong running time, the musical is a fun romp with plenty of, ahem, killer tunes.
  64. Mr. Harrigan's Phone
    There’s a bittersweetness to Craig and Harrigan’s friendship and good chemistry between the leads.
  65. Is That Black Enough for You?!?
    An occasionally static work if also an unequivocally important and gloriously comprehensive one.
  66. Waiting for Bojangles
    The infectious brio at the heart of “Bojangles” is a testament to the performances of the ensemble cast, but especially Duris and Efira, whose chemistry is magnetic.
  67. Our American Family
    Addiction is a complex, challenging topic, and Our American Family, in its sharp specificity, handles it with grace.
  68. The Book of Delights
    If this erotic drama doesn’t break new cinematic ground, it also doesn’t cede its conviction in portraying relationships as a matter of serious consideration.
  69. This Land
    The narratives in This Land are compelling, even if each of them would benefit from more screen time. (The Covid-19 pandemic affected the shooting schedule, and it shows.) On the whole, the film is best seen as a collage, rather than a definitive report, of the array of opinions brought on by the Trump-Biden race.
  70. Shadow of the Thin Man
    William Powell and Myrna Loy may not have invented star chemistry but they perfected it.
  71. Sirens
    The ending, in which the reunited Sirens play before an enthusiastic crowd, is heart-tugging and rousing, even for non-metal heads.
  72. A Compassionate Spy
    The general impression given by this warm, low-key film is that the spying was a simple act of pacifism. Countervailing voices are faint and few; anyone seeking more vigorous pushback will have to look elsewhere.
  73. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
    It leaves itself wide open to charges of pretentiousness. Yet "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" is so entertaining and so vigorously performed, especially by Newman in the title role, that its pretensions become part of its robust, knock-about style.
  74. The People's Joker
    It’s aggressively self-indulgent, cinematically topsy-turvy and exhausting. It’s also singular, daring and an uncompromising cannonball into the queer cinema pool.
  75. Johnny Handsome
    Because Johnny Handsome is a film by Walter Hill (The Warriors, Streets of Fire), it crams the following things into its first five minutes: gunfire, screeching brakes, a drug-popping hoodlum, a moll in black leather, a violent robbery, one murder, sinister masks, shattering glass. But because this is Mr. Hill's work, these ingredients are slapped together with high style.
  76. V/H/S/99
    These revenge stories move methodically from the familiar to the monstrous. They lean into gore, excess and, critically, smirking humor. A commitment to its staticky, period-appropriate aesthetic is the only thing its artists take deadly seriously.
  77. Four Winters: A Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance and Bravery in WW2
    “Four Winters” offers an enduring warning amid today’s global struggle with authoritarian forces: As one speaker explains, her neighbors were already antisemitic before the war, but with power, they became vicious.
  78. Please Baby Please
    The film’s ironic tone largely defangs the transgressive films it parodies, but Kramer does broaden the scope of the queer leather canon.
  79. Invisible Demons
    Through a series of arresting images, the director Rahul Jain presents a city on the verge of apocalypse.
  80. Susie Searches
    Susie Searches is more than comfortable drawing on the staid tropes of its genre, particularly those that paint mental illness as a path to depravity. But despite its narrative shortcomings, the film builds a tense and mischievous mood that acts as its hook.
  81. Wild Bill
    However hamstrung it occasionally becomes, "Wild Bill" is impressive for a thoughtful, daring spirit and a charismatic hero, so unapologetically larger than life.
  82. My Father's Dragon
    It’s one part doom cloud, one part squirting prank flower — an uneasy balance that’s united only by stunning visuals which sweep the audience along even when the gags stumble.
  83. The Swimmer
    Kalderon and the cinematographer Ofer Inov make Adonises out of the film’s athletes, but the film goes beyond mere marble-body ogling in its equal attention to the physical, psychological and emotional toll that training takes on Erez and Nevo.
  84. Emancipation
    Part of this movie’s power comes from its insistence that you look at the near-unbearable, that you confront slavery as a crime against humanity rather than the perverse myth of the so-called Lost Cause enshrined in countless paintings, books, films and statues.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Variety Lights
    As a straightforward comedy-drama about the vicissitudes of the principals in a small-time tab show or traveling vaudeville troupe, this is wholesome corn. But it is highly palatable fare, which, in its story line, hews more to the type of films subsequently made by Mr. Lattuada.
  86. Sell/Buy/Date
    Jones — who wrote, directed and stars in the film — doesn’t treat the tensions between exploitation and empowerment, personal agency and systemic cruelties, as binaries. Instead, they are riveting, confounding and, as exchanges between Jones and her mother attest, personal.
  87. The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile
    The movie interweaves the contemporary sessions with a very selective — and, while not wholly sanitized, certainly discreet — account of her tumultuous past. Overall it’s a better-than-competent piece of fan service and a not unpersuasive bid for an auxiliary youth audience.
  88. The Fire that Took Her
    In interviews, the director Patricia E. Gillespie has said that while pitching the film, people often asked whether she could cover or blur Judy’s face to shield audiences from her burns. Gillespie refused, and her resolve to train her camera on Judy gives the film an unflinching quality.
  89. The Pez Outlaw
    Like Pez, the film is charming and colorful — and perhaps too sweet.
  90. The Train
    It is a vivid melodrama through which Mr. Lancaster bolts with all that straight, strong, American sporting instinct and physical agility for which he is famous.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Snoopy Come Home
    This sprightly, clever and hilarious treat—all that a comic strip should be on the screen—is even better than "A Boy Named Charlie Brown," which began the series.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Theater of Blood
    Douglas Hickox's wry romp spotlights a vengeful Shakespearean ham (Vincent Price) and his helpful daughter (Diana Rigg). It's gory and funny. [14 Apr 1996, p.6]
    • The New York Times
  93. Madonna: Truth or Dare
    Truth or Dare is at the very least a potent conversation piece. It can also be seen as a clever, brazen, spirited self-portrait, an ingeniously contrived extension of Madonna's public personality and a studied glimpse into what, in the case of most other pop luminaries, would be at least a quasi-hidden realm.
  94. Nothing Lasts Forever
    That marketing campaigns are built on fallacies isn’t exactly revelatory, but in pairing his excavation of the diamond myth with new inquiries into how the industry is evolving (and how it’s stagnating), Kohn strikes on something valuable.
  95. Joyland
    Outrage works in the movie’s favor; this polite weepie needs the added spice. While about an unconventional affair, the movie is more interested in suppression and restraint.
  96. Darby and the Dead
    As familiar as this tale of female transformation feels, there is an authentic sweetness to Darby and Capri’s fledgling friendship. Their bond resuscitates a movie that might otherwise have been dead on arrival.
  97. Blue's Big City Adventure
    That winsome charm and gusto is infectious, as in a Central Park-set dance number with some of the Technicolor verve of an old Hollywood musical, and it manages to sustain this unflagging exuberance across its fleet 72-minute running time.
  98. Bruiser
    arren uses an assured hand in treating the family melodrama with the tenderness of a tone poem. For most of the film, he avoids painting in broad strokes while ratcheting up the conflict between Porter, a tattooed veteran living on a boat, and the bespectacled, seemingly upright Malcolm.
  99. The Corridors of Power
    As edited, Moreh’s interviews prize policy analysis and haunting candor over gotcha moments or grandstanding.
  100. The Noel Diary
    The director Charles Shyer brings a journeyman’s ease to the screenplay (based on Richard Paul Evans’s novel by the same name): embracing holiday movie expectations here, gently deflecting them there.
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