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. Hello, My Name Is Doris
    Indirection can be a beautiful tool in comedy and so it is in “Hello, My Name Is Doris,” which uses this funny, outwardly ridiculous character to tell a simple story about a love that rarely speaks its name, including in movies: that of an older woman for a much younger man.
  2. Love, Cecil
    The quirks of Beaton’s personality — his cultivation of enemies and frustrated romanticism, among them — are finally not as interesting as his work.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hannah Takes the Stairs
    Less notable for its story than for what the movie itself represents: an evolutionary entry in the so-called Do It Yourself (or D.I.Y.) independent film movement.
  4. Bring Them Down
    This portrait of already wounded people who can’t stop inflicting pain on themselves and each other has a great deal of integrity. But if you’re seeking ennobling sentiment, you’ll do well to look elsewhere.
  5. The Foot Fist Way
    An itsy-bitsy, ultra-indie, super-silly comedy packing huge laughs and unexpected heart.
  6. The Last Suit
    An unfortunately contrived Holocaust drama that labors under the delusion that the subject matter lends itself to uplift.
  7. Aurora
    A quiet, steady burn filled with stretches of unsettlingly reverberant silence cleaved in half by a midpoint eruption of violence. Here there is before, and then there is after.
  8. 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.
  9. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    The downbeat story unfolds in quick, incisive slashes in which the combination of minimal dialogue and gorgeous black-and-white photography lends the movie a chilly documentary realism.
  10. Split
    Split is lurid and ludicrous, and sometimes more than a little icky in its prurient, maudlin interest in the abuse of children. It’s also absorbing and sometimes slyly funny.
  11. Normal
    Normal — which heralds, according to the press notes, the birth of yet another franchise — navigates its cartoonish excesses with expected competence. As for Odenkirk, he’s golden; as mythology nerds will recall, Ulysses was also known as the Master of Cunning.
  12. Breaking the Frame
    Breaking the Frame is a tantalizing teaser for a story that still needs to be told.
  13. Until the End of the World
    The longer it gets, the loopier it gets. [19 Jan 1992, p.13]
    • The New York Times
  14. 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.
  15. Mayor Pete
    Showing Buttigieg at one public appearance after another, “Mayor Pete” more often plays like outtakes from the trail than an inside glimpse.
  16. The Adventures of Felix
    Makes its points gently; the picture presents its socially conscious messages as if they were written in the sand, on the beaches where Felix would probably prefer to frolic.
  17. Suddenly
    When Suddenly finds its soul in the last half-hour, the title begins to make a lovely sort of sense.
  18. I Capture the Castle
    The evident affection that the filmmakers bear toward Smith's novel, and toward the odd, spirited people who inhabit it, gives the film a modest, hardworking appeal.
  19. Bombay Eunuch
    The film offers a concise history of hijras, who used to officiate at births, weddings and other religious rituals.
  20. Echotone
    The realities in Nathan Christ's impressive documentary Echotone are, sadly, nothing new. But the emotions surrounding them are nevertheless compelling.
  21. Alpha
    Mr. Hughes, who for many years cocreated films with his twin brother, Allen, and here makes his solo feature debut, is a sharp and engaged visual storyteller. It’s a pleasure to see him working in expansive wide-screen, a fitting format for his chops.
  22. Life
    Lawrence and Murphy make an entertaining team. And they are surrounded by a supporting cast that makes the prison setting more pleasant than it has any right to be.
  23. The Hole in the Ground
    In a film where the central horror is the otherworldly absence of personality, the intended fear is undermined by the presence of a mother and son whose flawlessness is itself unnerving.
  24. L'amour fou
    To realize that you may have the world while still feeling as if you have nothing is to experience a closer encounter with the void than most of us are likely to have.
  25. The Great Yokai War
    Narrative coherence is perhaps not among the film's virtues, but its loopy, cluttered story is part of the fun. And a clearer, simpler plot might have required the sacrifice of some delightful grace notes and visual marvels, like the elastic-necked geisha or the one-eyed ambulatory umbrella.
  26. The Crazies
    An inept science-fiction film from George A. Romero, the Pittsburgh man who established himself as the Grandma Moses of exurban horror films with The Night of the Living Dead.
  27. Chef Flynn
    Chef Flynn is an engaging documentary about McGarry’s boy-to-man journey.
  28. The Upside of Anger
    A seriously flawed movie wrapped around two nearly perfect performances.
  29. Scoop
    What Scoop offers is the modest pleasure — to which any journalist is susceptible — of rooting for a reporting team to get a story.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    We Have Always Lived in the Castle
    Under Stacie Passon’s precise direction, this gothic fable of isolation and violence expertly treads a fine line between tragedy and camp.
  31. The Dreamers
    The Dreamers, which is disarmingly sweet and completely enchanting, fuses sexual discovery with political tumult by means of a heady, heedless romanticism that nearly obscures the film's patient, skeptical intelligence.
  32. Rank
    As thorough an examination of the sport as you could hope to squeeze into 90 taut, well-organized minutes.
  33. The Caine Mutiny
    The Caine Mutiny, though somewhat garbled, is a vibrant film.
  34. This Changes Everything
    Once it finally begins to focus on the mission, however, This Changes Everything not only becomes engrossing but reveals itself as a crucial cri de coeur.
  35. Faces of Death
    Blood-soaked and intense, it is occasionally uneven in tone, with varying degrees of skill from the cast. But story-wise, it mostly holds together, a thinker of a thriller that, even when it heads into pure slasher territory, still has its brain turned on.
  36. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
    In Kit’s world the absent father (a familiar theme from girls' novels including "Little Women" and "A Little Princess") is an epidemic, and the picture makes this the impetus for children's resourcefulness and emotional development.
  37. Sleeping Dogs Lie
    Sleeping Dogs Lie doesn't pretend to be more than it is: a blunt, provocative comedy sketch whose visual look is almost as bare as that of an episode of the underappreciated Home Box Office series "Lucky Louie." The acting, especially by Ms. Hamilton, is better than serviceable.
  38. This Christmas
    Boisterous and bittersweet, the film is not dull, but it does feel hopelessly overstuffed, with scant time to devote to any one story line.
  39. How to Get Ahead in Advertising
    The movie grows more and more desperate until it seems to go to pieces like poor brilliant Bagley. The final madness has less to do with wit than with a cinematic effect. The film's good humor, however, is consistent.
  40. Laggies
    This is a nice movie. It’s frisky and cheerful, even when tears are on the way. But it isn’t a very good movie, mainly because, like its heroine, it’s reluctant to make up its mind about what it wants to be.
  41. By Design
    Kramer has constructed an ironically detached artifact that invites questions about ownership and image and then bats them away, making it a frustrating experience with an intriguing veneer.
  42. The Rip
    Damon is the only one keeping his head above water, mostly because he’s the only one given the space to make decisions and navigate different dynamics. Everyone else is trapped in a kiddie game of cops and robbers.
  43. Another Thin Man
    This third of the trademarked Thin Men takes its murders as jauntily as ever, confirms our impression that matrimony need not be too serious a business and provides as light an entertainment as any holiday-amusement seeker is likely to find.
  44. Eureka
    There are enough plots here for several movies, but not enough for this one.
  45. The Devil Wears Prada 2
    Like the first movie, the second is a sleek diversion with brittle and sharp laughs, truckloads of couture threads and lashings of light drama.
  46. True Lies
    Much of the appeal of True Lies comes from the smooth grafting of battle-of-the-sexes comedy onto a high-tech action picture.
  47. SubUrbia
    Mr. Bogosian's venomously funny play, which he adapted himself for the screen, is given warmth and generosity by Mr. Linklater, whose elegantly fluid direction and great skill with actors are accentuated by the play's spareness.
  48. Free Fire
    Free Fire is an action movie finely tuned to even the most potentially vicious audiences’ tolerances. It is filled with mayhem, but avoids grisly violence — at least until the finale pulls out some gory, and not inapt, punch lines. Luxuriating in disreputability in all the right ways, the film also contains no shortage of profane verbal wit.
  49. Keanu
    As the genre machinery chugs along, the bang-bang begins to overwhelm the movie, and the underlying critique gives way to a what-me-worry shrug.
  50. Zero Charisma
    Has plenty of humor but no satirical bite.
  51. In the Earth
    If the bigger picture of In the Earth doesn’t appear fully realized — this is a movie not just of the moment, but perhaps rushed to meet it — it would be difficult, this year, for at least some of its atmosphere of isolation-induced madness not to inspire a chill.
  52. Beau Is Afraid
    Despite these attractions and in spite of Phoenix’s aura and his focus — and how he plays with the character, opening Beau up a wee bit with flickers of yearning and teasingly humanizing fissures — it is tough to care about a mouse who matters so much less to the filmmaker than the shiny mousetrap where he’s imprisoned you both.
  53. A Haunting in Venice
    In straddling genres, “Haunting” can get stuck in the middle. But there’s fun to be had there. What’s consistent is the elegant visuals — striking cinematography by Haris Zambarloukos — which mark this movie’s real genre as lavish old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment.
  54. Megamind
    Visually Megamind is immaculately sleek and gracefully enhanced by 3-D. The score by Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe is refreshingly subtle for an action comedy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Signal
    Part 1, directed by David Bruckner is superb, with affecting performances, a sense of dread reminiscent of John Carpenter’s “Prince of Darkness” and many striking images. Part 2, directed by Dan Bush aims for George Romero-style ghastly humor, but it’s more grating than funny. Part 3, directed by Jacob Gentry adds a splash of tragic love, but its preference for gore over feeling becomes monotonous.
  56. Burn After Reading
    The clubby, predictably self-amused comedy from Joel and Ethan Coen, has a tricky plot, visual style, er, to burn, but so little heart as to warrant a Jarvik 8.
  57. 12 Hour Shift
    It’s hard to argue with Bettis’s frazzled underplaying or Farnworth’s stellar airhead routine, an impressively sustained study in quick-witted dimwittedness.
  58. Invincible
    Invincible counters its predictably inspirational trajectory with close attention to historical detail and blue-collar hardship.
  59. The Matrix Resurrections
    The actors’ sincerity and effortlessly synced performances have always been this series’ greatest special effects, and watching them slip back into their old roles is a pleasure. The movie they’re in is still as beholden to the same old guns and poses as the earlier ones, the same dubious ideas about what constitutes coolness, the same box-office-friendly annihilating violence. But it’s still nice to dream of an escape with them.
  60. Peter von Kant
    Fassbinder’s work finds a kind of truth in the artifice of emotionally plumped-up dramas, but Ozon’s often tedious tragicomedy never hits such a stride, trusting that the material will automatically confer greatness; instead, “Peter” comes off like top-shelf fan-fiction.
  61. Shutter Island
    Something TERRIBLE is afoot. Sadly, that something turns out to be the movie itself.
  62. Allegro
    Its most intriguing moments evoke the way that memory plays tricks and our visions of the past are actually scrambled composites of impressions and feelings.
  63. Boiler Room
    Reflects the sensibility of the generation it holds up to critical scrutiny, and it's a cunningly ambiguous act of self-portraiture.
  64. Petits frères
    Captures the vulnerability and aimlessness of its unfortunate characters with a heart-in-your-throat rawness that recalls some of the more poignant moments of Italian neo-realist cinema.
  65. Diamonds and Rust
    A film that chugs along as listlessly as the ship itself, discovering moments of value in a sea of ennui.
  66. 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup
    At under 90 minutes, Around a Small Mountain is, by Mr. Rivette’s standards, a small vignette. It could have been —--and perhaps was -- part of something longer and more complex, but it stands as perfectly on its own as Pic St.-Loup, marvelous to contemplate and changing slightly every time you see it.
  67. The Parking Lot Movie
    A quirky documentary about, yes, a parking lot, is probably not unlike working at such a lot: there are long stretches when not much happens, but every once in a while there's a burst of activity that is kind of enthralling.
  68. Amigo
    Amigo is a well-carpentered narrative, fast-moving and emphatic, stepping nimbly from gravity to good humor.
  69. Wretches & Jabberers
    The film is maddeningly vague about how the two men made their initial breakthroughs, but it certainly is proof that even those who are written off as children can find a voice.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Nine Muses
    At once austere and conceptually overwrought, The Nine Muses is both too much and not enough.
  71. Under Control
    Somehow the happy screams of children whirling above a neutered reactor sound a lot less comforting than they should.
  72. Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same
    Photographed in crisp black and white by Nat Bouman, this enormously likable movie keeps sexual politics on the back burner and the universal search for connection front and center.
  73. Keyhole
    To a die-hard Maddinite this may be a little disappointing, but for that reason Keyhole may also be a perfect gateway into the bizarre and fertile world of a unique film artist.
  74. Player Hating: A Love Story
    A sad chronicle of absent fathers and messed-up mothers, drugs as currency and violence as the period at the end of every argument.
  75. You Are Here
    Moments of insight flare like fireflies and disappear, whether from underfinancing or overambition is unclear. Either way, this maddening mind game is likely to be more enthusiastically received in philosophy classrooms than in the multiplex.
  76. State 194
    This is certainly competent filmmaking, sort of like a long “60 Minutes” segment without the confrontational interview style.
  77. Student
    It’s the no-nonsense filmmaking, seamlessly integrating even dreams and visions, that keeps us fixed on the bold line of the student’s trajectory, all the way through to a transcendent ending.
  78. Peaches Does Herself
    Feeling a little stage-bound because of frequent far-back long shots, the show can’t quite become a true extravaganza on screen. But Peaches — even without commanding the screen — shines through, vulnerability winning out over bravado here.
  79. Llyn Foulkes One Man Band
    The filmmakers are blessed and cursed with a subject who seems to lack the usual filters. We in turn witness Mr. Foulkes in action, at length — revamping his works, railing against the art world and speaking his neurotic mind.
  80. K2: Siren of the Himalayas
    Shedding light on the filmmaking process would have only enriched this well-wrought but limited extreme-sports portrait.
  81. Kung Fu Elliot
    Watching Elliot and his fellows stumble determinedly through shoots, pleasantly delusional about the movie’s prospects, is mildly amusing, a testament to indie film’s appeal for a certain hardy strain of dreamer. But the joke sours, and the documentary, filmed over two years, turns darker.
  82. Farewell to Hollywood
    Farewell to Hollywood is moving yet queasily unsettling, even if Ms. Nicholson’s enthusiasm mitigates the veneer of exploitation. Watching it feels like judging a last will and testament. The movie is an intimate dialogue from which viewers may prefer to recuse themselves.
  83. Brand: A Second Coming
    Brand: A Second Coming wants to tell the story of a man overcoming temptation and trading a shallow approach to life for something more sustaining and profound. It’s undone by its own shallowness, and by the limited appeal of its subject.
  84. Love at First Fight
    For its first two-thirds, the film, written and directed by Thomas Cailley, seems to be groundbreaking. Then it slides into comforting familiarity.
  85. Karski & the Lords of Humanity
    Karski & the Lords of Humanity is fascinating, but Mr. Lanzmann’s efforts tower over it.
  86. A Good American
    A Good American gets bogged down in details and personnel talk, but its subjects have an urgent narrative to tell.
  87. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
    A most delightfully acted and gracefully entertaining film, fashioned much in the manner of a stage drawing-room comedy, that seems to be about something much more serious and challenging than it actually is.
  88. Padmaavat
    Mr. Bhansali is painting with a broad brush.
  89. Night Shift
    This is a halfway funny movie, one that's got loads of good gags in its first half and nothing but trouble in its second.
  90. The Strongest Man in the World
    A Walt Disney comedy based on the old magic-formula story that's served the company well through thick (The Absent-Minded Professor) and thin (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes). The new film, which opened at theaters throughout the city yesterday, is nowhere near as funny as the first but a lot better than the second.
  91. The Man from Snowy River
    To appreciate it fully, however, one must have a completely uncritical fondness for Kirk Douglas as he acts his heart out in two roles; for picturesque landscapes; for silly plots, and for dialogue that leans heavily on aphorisms too homespun to be repeated in a big-city newspaper.
  92. Dreamscape
    An enjoyably half-baked movie, and if it were any less farfetched it would be less fun.
  93. Phantom of the Opera
    To be sure, the production is elegant. Settings and costumes are superfine and, photographed in technicolor, they all mawe a lavish display. But that richness of décor and music is precisely what gets in the way of the tale.
  94. Sing Me a Song
    Balmès doesn’t arrive at easy, scathing conclusions about the internet. Instead, he lets the camera journey to unexpected places, leading to a different kind of meditation that strikes with deep emotional resonance.
  95. Tove
    The soft-focus cinematography is beautiful but drippy, and this general tendency toward mushy melodramatics presents an unflattering contrast to the sharp-lined vivacity that Jansson brought to the page.
  96. Convergence: Courage in a Crisis
    The critical edge of the film feels blunted by platitudes (“Opportunities are born from crises,” says Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization), not to mention the exhaustion viewers will likely feel in reliving early memories of the still-ongoing pandemic for nearly two hours.
  97. The Outsider
    The Outsider is vivid even if it isn't much of a character study, and energetic even though it's often clumsy.
  98. Money Shot: The Pornhub Story
    Here is a documentary that casts a clear eye on the offenses of an industry driven by capitalism while never losing sight of the workers whose safety and success should be that profession’s number one priority.
  99. Butterfly Vision
    The film might aim to deliver an aesthetic and emotional jolt, but it is the mundane, interpersonal moments that linger.
  100. Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia
    The documentary “Glitch” is slyer and smarter than some of its paint-by-numbers dramatized contemporaries, and the story it prefers to tell is more interesting and complex than the battle of two domineering egoists who came up with a novelty app.
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