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. Better Than Chocolate
    For all the real problems faced by its characters, Better Than Chocolate is finally a comic rhapsody to romantic love, the possibility of happily ever after within an all-accepting subculture.
  2. Four Samosas
    Unlike so many new movies that seem to be algorithmically manufactured to appeal to diverse audiences and tick the boxes of representation, Four Samosas feels organic and true as a slice of Indian American life — even if it’s all fun and games and movie magic.
  3. The Ref
    Don't be misled by commercials that make The Ref look like slapstick silliness. This is a grown-up film that delights in undermining Christmas cliches.
  4. You People
    Hill and London build on a nice vibe. Their characters are playful and frisky, in sync with their eye rolling and mouthing of apologies from across a room.
  5. Loudmouth
    As straightforward as it appears, Loudmouth also invites an engaged but necessarily judicious scrutiny.
  6. Plane
    Plane” sinks (or rises, depending on your perspective) to “hell yeah” ridiculousness only at the end, delivering a punchline that lands at the right time.
  7. Jurassic Punk
    Directed by Scott Leberecht, Jurassic Punk tells the very juicy story of pioneers, naysayers and professional hierarchies that made Williams both the Necessary Man and an eventual outcast.
  8. Pelosi in the House
    So what does this long-gestating, obviously affectionate, obviously politically simpatico account of Nancy Pelosi’s career, including her rise to and tenures as the first female House speaker, have to offer? For a start, it provides an unusual opportunity to watch Pelosi negotiate legislation and rally votes.
  9. Children of the Mist
    The filmmaker Ha Le Diem shot Children of the Mist over the course of three years, integrating herself into Di’s life in a way that complicates the documentary’s otherwise unobtrusive, observational approach.
  10. It's a Wonderful Binge
    The stirring pratfalls and well-placed dirty jokes make It’s a Wonderful Binge a keenly subversive Christmas movie.
  11. Twisters
    It’s loaded with fun and sometimes funny set pieces and enough danger to keep you on your toes.
  12. Jethica
    At once dryly funny and surprisingly poignant, Jethica uses the paranormal as a metaphor for abusive male behavior. The film’s deadpan perspective and unhurried pacing can diffuse its surprises, but Ohs has an offbeat style that’s fresh and fun.
  13. All Eyes Off Me
    Within this framework, Avishag’s wants and needs are not quite legible enough to trace a satisfying arc, but unspooling under the film’s stylish, judgment-free gaze, her interactions are alluring nonetheless.
  14. L'Immensità
    In dreams, he imagines himself and his mother as glamorous figures in a monochrome variety-show spectacle, poignant bouts of movie-magic that underscore both Andrew’s innocence and his sharpening intuition: Freedom, for the both of them, will mean upending reality itself.
  15. Bank of Dave
    Even if the movie is about one small win, there’s a sedate pleasure in seeing it play out, especially knowing a version of it happened in real life.
  16. 80 for Brady
    We’re so pleasantly pummeled by silliness that the film comes to feel like a massage.
  17. The Pod Generation
    While its heady themes yield commentary that is ultimately just a tad thin, Barthes’s satire is best enjoyed the way it’s made — without taking itself too seriously.
  18. The Starling Girl
    A tender tale, The Starling Girl twirls through a spate of clichés — many surround Jem’s relationship to her alcoholic father, Paul (Jimmi Simpson) — but sticks the landing thanks to Parmet’s rapt attention to the shifting desires of her central character.
  19. Sometimes I Think About Dying
    A movie like this one, reserved and a little mysterious, can be unnerving. Occasionally it feels as if Sometimes I Think About Dying is a bit too withholding, dragging down the story it has to tell. But there’s a lot here to like.
  20. Full River Red
    At times, particularly in its overwrought closing act, the film feels as if it’s going to collapse under the weight of its relentless, convoluted twists. But the lighthearted tone poking through keeps it afloat, and suspends the viewer in mostly carefree entertainment for its two-and-a-half-hour running time.
  21. A Little Prayer
    This is a filmmaker able to wrest real feeling from his actors, and from his audience.
  22. Little Richard: I Am Everything
    I Am Everything is content to be a thorough, energetic, largely chronological appraisal, more interested in saluting a musical legend who shook things up than in shaking up conventions itself.
  23. Fairyland
    This moving film’s sense of hometown pride is subtle but apt.
  24. Fancy Dance
    Tremblay’s film is not always graceful — the dialogue and acting can be stilted, and one hopes for a little more formal rigor — but it’s a strong debut undergirded by a palpably real emotional core and an un-showy sense of the reality of reservation life.
  25. Filmmakers for the Prosecution
    It’s all a reminder of the labor and risks that go into creating and preserving essential imagery of the past, even for the most notorious events in history.
  26. Cocaine Bear
    For an audience desperately looking for a good time, they’ll find it. More discerning fans of junk might see an opportunity missed.
  27. Pamela, a love story
    The collision of her good-faith lack of inhibition with institutionalized misogyny makes this Canadian’s biography a very disquieting American story.
  28. Kokomo City
    Most important, Daniella, Koko, Liyah and Dominique provide a record of their own extraordinary lives, one that resonates with clarity and compassion.
  29. The Civil Dead
    Gently discursive and virtually plotless, The Civil Dead is a walking-and-talking movie that finds uncommon humor in Whit’s need to be seen and Clay’s extreme discomfort with that responsibility.
  30. Drift
    Drift, a patient character study set on a craggy Greek island, proves a mesmerizing showcase for the actress Cynthia Erivo’s talents.
  31. Bottoms
    For most of its tight running time, Bottoms hovers on the cusp of greatness. It’s often funny but it also never delivers satisfying set pieces, and stops short of questioning — not to mention subverting — the warped high school stratification that remains one of America’s building blocks.
  32. Love in the Time of Fentanyl
    Though at times the film’s narrative momentum and focus on its subjects is lacking, it shows that drug users, to whom the drug crisis is more than an abstract idea, are perhaps the most capable of creating solutions to the overdose epidemic.
  33. Air
    Written by Alex Convery, Air nicely hits the sweet spot between light comedy and lighter drama that’s tough to get right. It’s funny, but its generous laughs tend to be low-key and are more often dependent on their delivery than on the actual writing.
  34. They Wait in the Dark
    More tingly than terrifying (and more than a smidge off-the-wall), “Dark” has a cheeky boldness. Rea, a prolific independent filmmaker, deploys the gore judiciously and his actors are above reproach.
  35. Lonesome
    Lonesome demonstrates a mature use of sex in cinema, a treatment that communicates narrative purpose without diminishing sex’s animalistic, physical side.
  36. The First Fallen
    A gay man of a younger generation, de Oliveira mourns the vulnerability of these characters’ bodies while paying tribute to their flourishes and fears.
  37. She Came to Me
    Amid the roiling neuroses of the adults, the young beloveds provide the film with a surprising emotional ballast.
  38. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
    For all its clichés, this furious and discomfiting film tugs on your conscience for days, making a powerful case to turn the American public’s attention back to a conflict it would rather forget.
  39. Reality
    Satter, a veteran theater director, makes a smooth transition into her feature film debut, written with James Paul Dallas. She’s skilled at evoking tension from a minimal set.
  40. The Adults
    Defa’s tight and tidy focus on communication — mostly verbal, sometimes role play (“Hug me like you haven’t seen me for three years,” Rachel instructs Eric) — adds a smart layer to this otherwise familiar tale of estrangement.
  41. Golda
    Extreme costuming often feels gimmicky, but here, it humanizes the director Guy Nattiv’s terse accounting of guilt.
  42. Yanagawa
    It’s a quiet, elemental nourishment of the senses.
  43. Dancing the Twist in Bamako
    The plot of “Dancing the Twist” is busy, the emotions big, and the screen sometimes as crowded with character and incident as a page of Dickens.
  44. Femme
    The film avoids a cut-and-dried triumphalism for something more slippery and, perhaps, more meaningful, too.
  45. Kiss the Future
    This is history told through emotions as much as through well-documented events, conveying both the resilience of Sarajevans and the power of pop music (without falling into too much celebrity self-regard).
  46. Limbo
    Sen, who also handled both the black-and-white cinematography and the editing, has a terrific eye for shot composition and sets a deliberate pace that feels implacable rather than merely slow.
  47. The Sterile Cuckoo
    Quite clearly, Pookie Adams is a marvelous role, full of tough-sweet humor, and Liza Minnelli, the daughter of Vincente Minnelli and the late Judy Garland, turns it into one of the most appealing performances of the season, a triumph limited only by the squashy movie that encases it.
  48. On the Adamant
    That Philibert doesn’t stick to a “main character,” or impose a phony narrative arc, vibes well with the facility’s free-spirited methods, even if the documentary lacks the drama of a more structured production.
  49. Sansón and Me
    The film is an unusually layered look at how the combination of privation, misplaced familial loyalty and just plain rotten luck can make the immigrant experience in America a nightmare.
  50. The Year Between
    This lived-in quality to the filmmaking supports equally relaxed performances from both veteran and emerging actors, making for an even-keeled and easy viewing experience.
  51. The Innocent
    The entertainment value of The Innocent lies not in the actual heist — which amounts to little more than a shipment of caviar at a truck stop — but in its lighthearted comedy, its by-the-numbers romance plot and its relatable family drama grafted onto an absurd premise.
  52. Film, the Living Record of our Memory
    For a documentary largely about archives, it should be better organized, but its breathless profusion of information underscores the scale of the task at hand.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The April Fools
    The April Fools is not a comic masterpiece, but it has a nice, understated sense of the absurd.
  54. No Hard Feelings
    Lawrence is a consistently incandescent screen presence, and her role lets her run through her greatest performative hits, so to speak. She’s goofily sexy, poignantly wide-eyed and retains a beaming, you-can-deny-her-nothing smile.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Endless Summer
    Happily, the viewer is not asked to ponder profundities very often—just to have fun.
  56. The Holly
    It’s all a heady brew that leaves one wanting to know even more about Roberts, who is now running for mayor in Denver. The movie resists encapsulating him, or perhaps he escapes its director’s full understanding.
  57. Problemista
    Problemista, which Torres wrote, directed and stars in, reveals a new willingness to tell a relatable story with a riveting sketch of an honest-to-goodness person.
  58. Smile
    It's an especially American kind of social comedy in the way that great good humor sometimes is used to reveal unpleasant facts instead of burying them.
  59. 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.
  60. Americana
    Compared with “Eddington,” this summer’s other tongue-in-cheek neo-western, the movie, ostensibly set in South Dakota, is less aggressive in its efforts to appear topical; it may not even have much on its mind beyond clever plot construction. But watching its pieces snap into place is more fun.
  61. Crater
    Most of all, the film is surprisingly nimble at incorporating an emotional core that makes its story more interesting than the adventure itself.
  62. The Beasts
    The stately Foïs carries the film as it devolves into a restrained drama about familial loyalty and womanly fortitude, its change of gears not entirely clicking into place.
  63. Lewis Capaldi: How I'm Feeling Now
    Remarkably, “How I’m Feeling Now” manages to escape most of the promotional trappings of its ilk, striking a more meaningful note than other pop star docs.
  64. Passion
    Passion has a low-fi, hangout feel, flush with the youthful indie energy and forgivable pretensions of an artist who believes that filmmaking matters. Hamaguchi is still a student but already finding his voice.
  65. Plan 75
    Baisho gets across the creeping despair that morbidity and the loss of community can create — a sensation that lets Plan 75 double as a consummate entry in pandemic-era cinema.
  66. The Star
    Even though redundant and familiar, as this performance inevitably is, with its obviously patterned reproduction of a caustic and vanity-ridden dame, Miss Davis still makes it sizzle with stinging sarcasm and feminine fire, so that it gives the illusion of emerging as a shaft of withering light from Hollywood.
  67. Peyton Place
    Except that they take a long time at it, Scriptwriter John Michael Hayes and Director Mark Robson construct a drama of personal tensions and incongruities that has something of the irony and terror of the film version of "An American Tragedy."
  68. The Pope's Exorcist
    Avery (“Samaritan”) drives the film at a pace as caffeinated as Amorth himself, and manages to incorporate legitimate scares into a plot halfway between Indiana Jones and a Dan Brown potboiler, with camp touches worthy of Ken Russell.
  69. Hilma
    Hallstrom wins the audience back with his sincere connection to af Klint, played in her bullheaded youth by his daughter, Tora Hallstrom, and in her muttering years by his wife, Lena Olin.
  70. The Plains
    Fans of structural film, “Jeanne Dielman” and Google Maps will find much to treasure, even if the narrative elements — and occasional cutaways to imagery shot in a more remote area in western Victoria — upset the movie’s rigor and purposeful tedium.
  71. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
    A less sentimental, wish-fulfilling approach to Mexican American identity, gay self-discovery and Reagan-era Texas will wait for another day. Until then, fans of “Heartstopper”-style slow-burn romance will eat up this tender film’s subtle charms.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Them!
    Suffice it to say that the combination of three writers, director Gordon Douglas, producer David Weisbart and a cooperative cast have helped make the proceedings tense, absorbing and, surprisingly enough, somewhat convincing.
  73. Winter Boy
    Winter Boy shines when it allows its actors to quietly play out family dynamics, with Lacoste, Binoche and especially Kircher wearing the many shades of grief with effortless, endearing naturalism.
  74. Every Body
    The film benefits from its choice of subjects, as Wall, Gallo and Weigel are all endearing and deeply informed.
  75. Red White & Royal Blue
    First-time director Matthew López gets us rooting for the cheeky couple’s transition from rivals to romantic bedfellows, boosted by the cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, who photographs the leads so adoringly that you half-expect them to turn to the camera and hawk a bottle of cologne. Thanks to their playful chemistry, we’re sold.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Broadway
    Amid some uneven characterizations, the cast enlivens Broadway with their compelling performances, sealed by a stirring finale and a characteristically soaring score from Gabriel Yared.
  77. Alan Pakula: Going for Truth
    Pakula’s work with actors or the resurgent meaning of his trilogy could have been documentaries unto themselves. But the viewer might not have gotten an adjacent set of insights from his family, particularly Hannah Pakula, his second wife. Her tender, incisive regard creates an ache even as it offers solace.
  78. Will-o'-the-Wisp
    Will-o’-the-Wisp, an off-balance provocation from the Portuguese titillater João Pedro Rodrigues, is a prank in fancy dress, a plastic boutonniere that squirts battery acid. The joke is on everyone, particularly the powerful and those holding out hope that the powerful will save the planet.
  79. The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons
    This is a substantial, patiently made, entertaining portrait, with a percussive, rhythmic jazz score by Ramachandra Borcar and some emphatic spoken word courtesy of Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets. But eventually, the rich interpretive consideration of Hammons’s essence, philosophy and process starts to vanish.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Niagara
    The producers are making full use of both the grandeur of the Falls and its adjacent areas as well as the grandeur that is Marilyn Monroe. The scenic effects in both cases are superb.
  81. Confessions of a Good Samaritan
    What begins as an optimistic piece of advocacy eventually veers into something more complex, ambivalent and even frantic.
  82. Lust for Life
    Both the script and the performance of this picture have a striking integrity in putting forth the salient details and the surface aspects of the life of van Gogh.
  83. Riceboy Sleeps
    Even while it’s hampered by these rough edges, the movie is terrifically scored and beautifully shot.
  84. Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy
    “Desperate Souls” convincingly argues that there’s no other time at which Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) could have become enduring movie characters, let alone have the tenderness between them depicted so subtly.
  85. Umberto Eco - A Library of the World
    Exploring fictional worlds with Eco for a guide remains a diverting and often enlightening pursuit.
  86. Songwriter
    Though Songwriter is an original, it recalls the director's earlier Roadie in its choppiness, its knowing view of show business, and its humor, which tends to be exuberantly rude.
  87. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!
    The young cast proves deft with the film’s clever script, by Alison Peck (based on the 2005 novel by Fiona Rosenbloom), and the director Sammi Cohen indulges the virgin-mojito passions of preteens while avoiding nostalgia, thankfully.
  88. The Out-Laws
    The Out-Laws, directed by Tyler Spindel, is a slight comedy, but it’s also raucous and kickily violent, with several laugh-in-spite-of-your-better-judgment bits.
  89. The Great Ziegfeld
    The picture has the opulence, the lavishness, the expansiveness and the color of the old Follies; it has the general indifference to humor which was one of Ziegfeld's characteristics; and it has the reverential approach with which, we suspect, Mr. Ziegfeld might have handled his own life story.
  90. Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl
    The finale is as compassionate as it is sad and unnerving.
  91. Anatomy of a Fall
    In a sense, Triet has mapped a path to nowhere. You can respect her choice intellectually and still walk away grumbling in frustration.
  92. Banel & Adama
    As Sy continues obliquely gesturing at meaning, you remain engaged but also find yourself wishing that all these many desperate pieces fit together more coherently.
  93. Too Many Crooks
    Too Many Crooks is strictly of that surface order, but it's a good, crazy, brisk farce comedy.
  94. The New Boy
    Thornton, who briefly attended a Christian boarding school when he was a child, brings a textured perspective to this story of cultural violence and white guilt.
  95. The Sweet East
    Maybe it’s low hanging fruit that the white supremacist character is the best comic fodder, but the film’s trolling is stranger and more esoterically inclined than its selection of political punching bags would seem to warrant.
  96. The Attachment Diaries
    A trashy treat coated in a high-art gloss, The Attachment Diaries gleefully kneads melodrama, noir, horror and sexual perversion into a pathological romance between two deeply damaged women.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The One That Got Away
    If not a milestone, The One That Got Away adds up to a consistently good tingler.
    • The New York Times
  98. Faraway, So Close!
    Like Mr. Wenders's previous film, last year's "Until the End of the World," this one begins as a swirl of dazzling ambition and at midpoint turns into a mess. Even so, and even at 2 hours and 20 minutes, it is one of the more intriguing messes on screen.
  99. Fireworks
    The filmmaker's equal fondness for bright floral paintings and exploding blood bags is sure to keep an audience on its toes, even if some of the effects are as blunt as (quite literally) chopsticks in the eye.
  100. Rise
    This is a sweet, uncomplicated story relayed with enough entrancing dance breaks to fill an American halftime show.
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