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. Newlyweeds
    Newlyweeds, for all its freshness, never really lands. It remains suspended in a haze of secondhand smoke.
  2. Enough Said
    Line for line, scene for scene, it is one of the best-written American film comedies in recent memory and an implicit rebuke to the raunchy, sloppy spectacles of immaturity that have dominated the genre in recent years.
  3. First Cousin Once Removed
    Mr. Berliner’s film bravely brings us to the edge of language and experience.
  4. Price of Gold
    A noncommittal, occasionally surreal portrait of hardscrabble lives and omnipresent risk.
  5. Naked As We Came
    A lovely small surprise of a film.
  6. Herb & Dorothy 50X50
    It’s difficult to dislike a documentary with such noble, generous subjects, but the film is unfocused and repetitious, not sure whether it is a road trip, a story of a couple or an exploration of small art institutions.
  7. Hawking
    Mr. Hawking — no shy and retiring genius, he — has star quality that he lets shine, whatever the limitations of its packaging.
  8. Informant
    Mr. Meltzer doesn’t quite find an effective tone or structure to stay on top of his unsettling person of interest.
  9. Good Ol' Freda
    Good Ol’ Freda celebrates an intensely private witness to four of the most public lives in pop-culture history.
  10. Wadjda
    With impressive agility, Wadjda finds room to maneuver between harsh realism and a more hopeful kind of storytelling.
  11. Sample This
    The real pleasure of this film lies in its recognition of session artists and in the oddities and mysteries within the evolution of any given item of pop culture.
  12. GMO OMG
    To the informed consumer hoping for greater elucidation, Mr. Seifert’s partisan, oversimplified survey falls short.
  13. Mother of George
    This is not a fable of assimilation or alienation, but rather the keenly observed story of two people seeking guidance in painful and complicated circumstances.
  14. Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve
    The film doesn’t really live up to its subtitle. There is little sense of what kinds of debates take place at board meetings or how pressure is applied behind closed doors.
  15. Jayne Mansfield's Car
    Behind the clunky machinery is a lyrical meditation on life, death, heroism, regret and forgiveness written in a florid style that might be described as Tennessee Williams on testosterone.
  16. Blue Caprice
    The Beltway sniper case was solved a long time ago. But in some respects, Mr. Moors’s haunting film suggests, it is still a mystery.
  17. Insidious: Chapter 2
    A mess from start to finish — though, judging by the ending, this story won’t be over any time soon — Insidious: Chapter 2 is the kind of lazy, halfhearted product that gives scary movies a bad name.
  18. And While We Were Here
    Subject matter that seemed mildly shocking, even radical, a half-century ago may be impossible to refresh, though the screenplay, by Ms. Coiro, has a firm grasp of its characters.
  19. The Last Time I Saw Macao
    A sly, amusing if underconceptulized and needlessly elliptical inquiry into truth, memory and appearances.
  20. The Family
    The movie has holes galore. It has abrupt tonal shifts, an incoherent back story and abandoned subplots. It doesn’t even try for basic credibility. But buoyed by hot performances, it sustains a zapping electrical energy.
  21. Four
    The close-ups of faces convey reams of inchoate emotion and enhance the stumbling poetry mouthed by characters whose urge to connect conflicts with their innate sense of caution.
  22. Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
    Matching her subject’s lackadaisical rhythms, Ms. Huber has shaped an unusually poetic biopic.
  23. Mademoiselle C
    The filmmaking has some of the wit and irreverence of its subject, but goes on meandering tangents rather than having a cohesive vision or tone.
  24. Shuddh Desi Romance
    Ms. Kapoor, in her early 20s, gives a performance that seems to reinvent female confidence.
  25. The Ultimate Life
    The Ultimate Life is hampered by a predictable story, stereotypical characters and wooden acting.
  26. I Am Breathing
    Mr. Platt’s good-humored attitude helps keep the potent material from turning mawkish, and having his perspective also wards off a sense of exploitive voyeurism.
  27. 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film
    The variety of physical perspectives lends a vivid you-are-there aspect to this record of the Zuccotti Park protest in New York in 2011.
  28. Red Obsession
    Red Obsession, a little too stuffed for its nearly 80 minutes, may already be dated, since China’s wine fever has cooled recently. Still, the movie raises legitimate concerns about the cultural and economic implications of status-minded overconsumption.
  29. My Father and The Man In Black
    No one in this complex and haunting documentary feels fully explained.
  30. 36 Saints
    A modest effort only fitfully attaining its aims.
  31. Tio Papi
    What lingers is the affectionate sense of family and place. Modest goals accomplished.
  32. Bounty Killer
    Watching this movie feels like viewing a very long, expensive car commercial and waiting for the real film to begin.
  33. Fire in the Blood
    This virtuous stance is not unusual for issue-based documentaries, but a film with such illuminating content deserves a more artful vehicle for its moving message.
  34. Il Futuro
    Ms. Scherson’s style — backed wholeheartedly by the cool cinematography of Ricardo de Angelis — may value mood over information, but it’s the perfect vehicle for a portrait of two damaged souls grasping for a security they no longer possess.
  35. Flu
    The romance may be risible, but the scenes of mass panic and political desperation are slickly disturbing.
  36. A Teacher
    Long on atmosphere and short on believability.
  37. Hell Baby
    The film, written and directed by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, rarely dares to be smart, settling instead for familiar gags that would have the Devil himself yawning.
  38. American Made Movie
    American Made Movie ends up feeling as if it were built from well-known facts and wishful thinking.
  39. Mission Park
    [A] regrettably hokey first feature from Bryan Anthony Ramirez.
  40. We the Parents
    Mr. Takata deserves praise for refusing to oversimplify the situation, although his film doesn’t always bring the conflict fully to life.
  41. American Milkshake
    The burlesque take on high school has some fine, ridiculous moments and lets the movie get away with more than a serious drama might.
  42. Out of the Clear Blue Sky
    A fascinating study of a man, and a firm, deeply changed by catastrophe.
  43. Best Kept Secret
    Best Kept Secret is an exemplary documentary: It spotlights an important issue yet never seeks to squeeze the truth into an easily digestible narrative frame. Instead it expands its storytelling to the boundaries of messy, joyful and painful reality.
  44. Populaire
    The best scenes are the contests in which the competitors hammer away, executing the kind of grand flourishes with each return of the carriage that Liberace exhibited at the piano.
  45. Touchy Feely
    Its humor is softer and more ambiguous than that of Ms. Shelton’s earlier films, and its characters are harder to pin down.
  46. Adore
    One of the things that makes Adore, which was written by Christopher Hampton, hard to take seriously is how seriously it takes itself, how utterly purged of humor or credible human complication the drama at its center turns out to be.
  47. Winnie Mandela
    The movie plays like a made-for-television quickie.
  48. Riddick
    There’s one man alone, stranded on a seemingly desolate distant planet with only his wits, his fists and his voice-over. That voice-over is mercifully spare, the landscape atmospherically barren and the action nice and tight.
  49. Salinger
    Salinger, directed by Mr. Salerno, is less a work of cinema than the byproduct of its own publicity campaign.
  50. La Maison de la Radio
    As Mr. Philibert continues to pop in and out of different studios, in and out of the building, flitting from one face to the other, it feels as if he were searching for a story that never emerges.
  51. Satyagraha
    It hits its themes too squarely on the nose and hits them for about an hour too long.
  52. Wampler's Ascent
    It’s then, as nature documentary and inspirational device, that Wampler’s Ascent finds its power.
  53. The Last Christeros
    Mr. Meyer adheres to a cinema of broad experience by casting rugged but uninspiring nonprofessionals and focusing on the rebels’ long, lonely struggle rather than on triumph and tactics.
  54. Tiny Times 2.0
    As entertainment, this is vintage potboiler fare. But the movie is also revealing as fantasy, an artifact of 21st-century China’s youth culture transfixed by its rising fortunes and Western ways.
  55. The Lifeguard
    This directorial debut by Liz W. Garcia, a writer for television, bears some echoes of its creator’s origins, going from deft to trite in its drama and setting up character arcs that feel sappily resolved within its feature length.
  56. Dark Tourist
    Suri Krishnamma’s Dark Tourist takes an effectively unpleasant trip down the lost highway of a morbid mind before its bad choices start catching up with it.
  57. Abigail Harm
    Abigail and her Asian friend’s own “forest” is filled with overburdened metaphors and quivering emotions, quirks and tics and even regulation Malick-like twirling. Some of this is pretty; none of it sticks.
  58. Afternoon Delight
    Whether or not you wince, this meticulously acted movie, which won Ms. Soloway a directing award at the Sundance Film Festival, paints an accurate picture of how a segment of youngish, educated, affluent, white Americans converse. It is anything but inspiring.
  59. One Direction: This Is Us
    With a group so evidently versed in the visuals of rock history, it’s a shame that a filmmaker wasn’t hired who would pay homage to classic pop films instead of offering a satisfactory paid promotional.
  60. Passion
    Passion is often sleek and enjoyable, dispensing titillation, suspense and a few laughs without taking itself too seriously.
  61. Getaway
    The glimmers of wit and carnival humor in the “Fast & Furious” franchise are nowhere to be found in Getaway.
  62. Closed Circuit
    The director, John Crowley, handles Steve Knight’s snaky script capably, introducing the characters, their backgrounds and the political stakes in bold strokes.
  63. Tokyo Waka: A City Poem
    The film is a short, nimble consideration of the collision between the wildness of nature and the orderly bustle of modern urban life. It is also an essay on ornithology, Japanese culture and the challenges of pest control.
  64. The United States of Football
    The film is a thorough piece of reporting on the issues, characters and deeper cultural ramifications. But rather than present this impressive investigation as an objective reporter, Mr. Pamphilon makes the film, perhaps unnecessarily, a personal story.
  65. Una Noche
    For all its flaws, the movie, filmed with nonprofessional actors, is steadily gripping.
  66. Scenic Route
    An awkward, long-winded mash-up of therapy session, horror movie and survival tale with pretensions of psychological depth.
  67. The Frozen Ground
    The movie’s only fresh element is the wintry setting, which shrouds everything in a mood of weary fatalism. Otherwise, it’s the same old, same old, efficiently discharged and utterly disposable.
  68. Sparrows Dance
    Mr. Buschel, armed with an ear for diverting dialogue and actors who know how to sell it, somehow makes it all work.
  69. Savannah
    The film’s tale ends up being less rich than its lovely Georgia settings.
  70. Paradise: Faith
    Like it or not, Paradise: Faith sticks in your head. The fierce, indelible performance of Ms. Hofstätter, a regular in Mr. Seidl’s films, may make you cringe with revulsion, but it is utterly riveting.
  71. Thérèse
    Mr. Miller’s stolid approach — with its waxwork figures, postcard beauty, insistent tastefulness and glaze of politesse — feels far too comfortably of this world to mount a critique of it.
  72. The Trials of Muhammad Ali
    The film falls short of explaining Mr. Ali, who, like many outspoken individuals, can stubbornly repel scrutiny, nor will it pacify the many who opposed his conscientious objections. But it also underlines one enduring quality: namely, that he probably couldn’t care less what people think.
  73. Devil's Pass
    The film is ridiculous and laugh-out-loud funny, though it’s sometimes hard to tell if this is intentional or not. Either way, it remains riveting because of its effective tropes.
  74. Drinking Buddies
    Drinking Buddies, Joe Swanberg’s nimble, knowing and altogether excellent new film, refuses to dance to the usual tune.
  75. The Grandmaster
    The Grandmaster is, at its most persuasive, about the triumph of style. When Ip Man slyly asks “What’s your style?” it’s clear that Mr. Wong is asking the same question because here, as in his other films, style isn’t reducible to ravishing surfaces; it’s an expression of meaning.
  76. You're Next
    Adam Wingard’s You’re Next strays just enough from formula to tweak our jaded appetites. That it does so without spraying the gore to geyserlike excess says a great deal about Mr. Wingard’s sensibility.
  77. Short Term 12
    Even as the gathering melodramatic storms threaten to swamp this pungent slice of life, Mr. Cretton manages to earn your tears honestly.
  78. The World's End
    The buzz of The World’s End is more like an antic sugar high than a reeling, drunken stupor. There are no headaches, dry mouth or crushing shame at the end — no “Hangover,” in other words. I’ll drink to that.
  79. The Student
    Pitched somewhere between allegory and documentary, the film looks at its characters in a dispassionate, almost deadpan way. They’re something more than specimens under glass but something less than fully rounded people.
  80. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
    Too much of the film feels like shorthand, a trail of teasing crumbs to lead us to the inevitable sequels.
  81. Old Cats
    You understand the different ways the members of this extended family are trapped, in physical space and in psychological patterns they don’t fully understand. But you also realize that, like house cats that venture to the door to sniff at the air outside, they don’t necessarily want to be free.
  82. Once Upon Ay Time in Mumbai Dobaara!
    Poor pacing and editing result in a lack of transition between scenes; poignant moments are punctuated with distracting music; and the dialogue is overstuffed with platitudes that land like corny messages from fortune cookies.
  83. The Happy Sad
    The actors are so relaxed and personable that the film’s occasional glibness — and its over-reliance on coincidence to further the cross-pollinating narrative — is easy to let slide.
  84. Herblock: The Black & the White
    It’s fortunate that the cartoons on display are such instantly satisfying works of popular genius, because, despite its subject, “Herblock” shows how even an edifying talking-heads documentary bumps up against the limitations of the format.
  85. Drew: The Man Behind the Poster
    At length, the cheerleading...becomes a mildly taxing torrent. And Mr. Struzan, while an agreeable presence, is not an especially engrossing speaker. But then there is his artwork, an essential aid to the movies — and often their superior.
  86. You Will Be My Son
    [A] beautifully acted movie.
  87. Jobs
    The Great Man theory of history that’s recycled in this movie is inevitably unsatisfying, but never more so when the figure at the center remains as opaque as Jobs does here.
  88. Spark: A Burning Man Story
    Since we can’t all attend Burning Man, we can be thankful for “Spark,” which is probably the next best thing.
  89. Inch'Allah
    Grim, intelligent and vividly photographed by the director’s father, Philippe Lavalette, Inch’Allah works best when the camera alights on Ava and Rand, whose marvelously mobile faces convey all the complexity that Chloe lacks.
  90. Austenland
    Advancing without a single original idea or surprising moment, Austenland seems torn between poking fun at the British and lampooning Austen’s many American fanatics — a riskier enterprise, considering that they’ll be needed to fill theater seats.
  91. Paranoia
    Mr. Oldman and Mr. Ford are the only actors in the film, directed by Robert Luketic (“Legally Blonde”), skillful enough to navigate the yards of jargon-packed boilerplate in Jason Hall and Barry L. Levy’s thudding screenplay.
  92. Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    Strong emotions — desperation, dread, desire — are indicated but not really communicated, and everything happens in a hazy atmosphere of humorless homage and exquisite good taste.
  93. Kick-Ass 2
    The writer and director, Jeff Wadlow, can’t obscure the movie’s misogyny, and he also has a tough time staging a scene and selling a joke. His worst offense is that he has no understanding of the power, gravity and terrible beauty of violent imagery, which means he has no grasp of cinema.
  94. Cutie and the Boxer
    Mr. Heinzerling is an artist too. The window he has opened onto the lives of his subjects is a powerful and beautiful visual artifact in its own right.
  95. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    A brilliantly truthful film on a subject that is usually shrouded in wishful thinking, mythmongering and outright denial.
  96. The Crash Reel
    An engrossing, unsettling documentary.
  97. The Patience Stone
    Mr. Rahimi opens up an entire world inside the couple’s modest house, filling its few rooms with enough air, sharp words and slow-boiling intrigue that the walls never feel as if they’re closing in on you.
  98. This Is Martin Bonner
    It’s gratifying to see the care taken with his characters, though it would be no betrayal of them for Mr. Hartigan to flesh out their world and their lives further.
  99. The United States of Autism
    Yes, the animated opening sequence has a professional polish that the rest of the film lacks, but the documentary’s chosen angle is meaningful: The world of autism is as diverse as the nation.
  100. Off Label
    The film’s stacked stories naggingly lack a cohesive train of thought beyond the often harmful pervasiveness of pharmaceuticals in American society.
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