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. Bone Lake
    The only serious liability is the script, which never quite goes far enough. The provocative questions don’t have provocative answers, and though the film gestures toward edginess, it feels altogether too tame, lacking a bunny-boiling moment that would really make you squirm.
  2. Crime in the Streets
    The production, which Donald Siegel has directed from the screen play of the original author, Reginald Rose, is cramped and flimsy. It matches the rest of the show.
  3. WTO/99
    It’s clear that the movie has a point of view; what’s most interesting, though, is the raw materials it employs.
  4. Bubble
    Easier to admire than love, Bubble is a fascinating exercise that seems calculated to repel most audiences, which probably suits Mr. Soderbergh just fine.
  5. ATL
    The fun here is in seeing a new batch of rappers try acting, and some of them turn out to be eminently watchable.
  6. The Lost Boys
    The Lost Boys is to horror movies what ''Late Night With David Letterman'' is to television; it laughs at the form it embraces, adds a rock-and-roll soundtrack and, if you share its serious-satiric attitude, manages to be very funny.
  7. 18½
    The film’s referential pleasures feel insubstantial, diminished by the direct comparison to more meaningful works of the period.
  8. Thanksgiving
    [Roth] knows his stuff and he’s very adept at serving up both gross-outs and real leap-from-your-seat moments.
  9. Youth in Revolt
    Sweet and slight and often charming coming-of-age tale.
  10. Love and Monsters
    Love and Monsters lacks the self-seriousness of typical dystopian flicks but, despite its surprisingly perfunctory title and relatively thin plot, it doesn’t completely lack depth.
  11. Mayhem
    The director, Joe Lynch, concocts an uneven blend of video game setups and corporate satire.
  12. Stage Fright
    Stage Fright is dazzlingly stagy but it is far from frightening.
  13. Art & Copy
    The world may be going “Mad Men,” but Doug Pray’s documentary Art & Copy,”which is being released just five days after the season premiere of that acclaimed television series, presents a very different picture of the advertising industry.
  14. Stander
    Loses some its bearings once it turns into a caper movie. The movie hardly bothers to explain the mechanics of the jailbreak or of the robberies themselves, which take place in a flurry of disguises and stickups that has a Keystone Kops flavor.
  15. Stinking Heaven
    The brisk clip and dashes of dark humor ward off actual despair, but the length poses challenges for some of the heavy lifting of character growth.
  16. Uncorked
    While the characters interact against the backdrop of varying degrees of racism and socioeconomic stressors, they are not defined by them. In other words, they are ordinary but no less noteworthy.
  17. Julia
    Ms. Swinton demands to be seen even when her character is on a self-annihilating bender so real that you can almost smell the stink rising off her. So I sat in my seat, cursed the screen and was grateful to watch an actress at the height of her expressive power claw toward greatness.
  18. Tequila Sunrise
    The movie has the fuzzy focus of someone who has stared too long at a light bulb. Narrative points aren't made and the wrong points are emphasized. It could also be that too much footage was shot so that, when the time came for editing, a lot of essential material had to be cut out.
  19. After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United
    Never forgetting the rush of the game, the directors regularly serve up fleet footage of the team’s highs and lows, allowing the rhythms of the field to set the film’s volatile beat.
  20. Farmageddon
    Nonetheless, the film's homespun quality (Ms. Canty, whose childlike voice provides intermittent narration, simply describes herself in the publicity notes as "the mom of four kids") works in its favor, as does its maker's agitated sincerity.
  21. 11/8/16
    Considering all that’s been written and said over the last year, there’s not much new to learn from 11/8/16. But the film remains engaging for its stories, and is likely to be more instructive in the future, when passions have cooled. Judging by most people here, that won’t be soon.
  22. Amerikatsi
    It’s an intriguing scenario, though not always played out skillfully. For better and worse, we feel Charlie’s confinement fully, as he watches another’s life go by and yearns for a proper home of his own.
  23. Hotel Mumbai
    It reduces the randomness of real-life bloodshed to the slick thrills of a popcorn movie. And after the mosque attacks in Christchurch, which led the film’s distributor in New Zealand to suspend the movie’s release there, its savagery is especially difficult to take.
  24. Anything's Possible
    Unlike its lead characters, Anything’s Possible never quite figures out if it wants to be distinctive or just another kid at school.
  25. Severance
    A lively romp through terrain less traveled than you might think.
  26. The Fitzgerald Family Christmas
    Mr. Burns shuffles this dense material with the dexterity of a card shark. The pace, although swift, is never rushed. The writing and acting give you vivid enough tastes of the characters - there are seven children, two parents, and assorted spouses, lovers and friends - so that each registers as a singular flavor.
  27. Totally F***ed Up
    This feisty, disjointed film finds something compelling in its characters even when they're so druggy they can barely stand.
  28. Sugar Town
    Warmly funny ...wise little comedy.
  29. Happy, Texas
    So soft-hearted it wouldn't hurt a fly.
  30. The Young Karl Marx
    The great virtue of The Young Karl Marx is its clarity, its ability to perceive the way the eddies of personal experience flow within the wider stream of history.
  31. V for Vendetta
    The more valid question is how anyone who isn't 14 or under could possibly mistake a corporate bread-and-circus entertainment like this for something subversive. You want radical? Wait for the next Claire Denis film.
  32. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    Instead of the kind of inspired imaginative synergy that distinguished the “Lord of the Rings” and later “Harry Potter” pictures, this movie, directed by Mark Waters (“Mean Girls”), feels more like a sloppy, secondhand pander.
  33. Oh, Hi!
    To the degree it works — and it does, a lot of the time — it’s a testament to its performers, especially Gordon and, once she arrives on the scene, Viswanathan, both of whom bring an energy to the screen that always has a touch of mischief, like they could veer off into lunacy or ecstasy at any time.
  34. Bleak Street
    The film’s enigmas are atmospheric, and somewhat superficial. It solicits the audience’s morbid curiosity rather than gripping our emotions or haunting our dreams. It’s a creepy and beguiling oddity, willfully weird but, at the same time, not quite weird enough.
  35. Misbehaviour
    Like most commercial movies about feminist history, though, it also has a toothless vision of protest and empowerment that’s doomed to fail its subject because its makers don’t (can’t) risk making the audience uncomfortable.
  36. The Same River Twice
    A piercingly poignant then-and-now portrait of five friends.
  37. Simon & the Oaks
    With its exhilarating World War II narrative and performances that touch notes intimate and grand, Simon and the Oaks has an exquisite, and epic, ache.
  38. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
    Quite a bit darker than "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," both in look and in mood. It is also in some ways more satisfying.
  39. Nothing in Common
    As long as the story stays with David's wooing of the big Colonial Airlines account and the company president's tough-minded daughter (Sela Ward), a good time is to be had. But in the last half-hour, everybody starts to slobber.
  40. Lee
    “Lee” feeds the desire to seek out more of her images. Winslet’s performance demands that we consider the force behind the camera.
  41. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it also holds whatever irreverent, anarchic impulses it might possess in careful check.
  42. Dreams Rewired
    Dreams Rewired is mostly content to entertain. Its explanations of how new inventions work are simplified to the point of superficiality.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Two Mules for Sister Sara
    I'm not sure that it is a great movie, but it is very good, and it stays and grows in the mind the way only movies of exceptional narrative intelligence do.
  44. The Mask of Zorro
    This is hot-weather escapism so earnestly retrograde that it seems new.
  45. Arizona Dream
    Arizona Dream is enjoyably adrift, a wildly off-the-wall reverie. It's more than a fish out of water.
  46. Iron Man 3
    Stuff blows up and then more stuff blows up because that’s what happens when diversions like this hit movie screens around this time of year: chaos reigns and then some guy cleans it up.
  47. 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.
  48. Alien: Resurrection
    Tauntingly flirtatious scenes between Ms. Ryder and Ms. Weaver give this film a sexual boldness that the others' action-adventure spirit lacked.
  49. Hollywoodland
    Ben Affleck has packed on the pounds, slipped on some tights and given this exasperating film far more than it gives in return.
  50. Backcountry
    Mr. MacDonald’s ability to notch up dread moment by moment — with a rustle of leaves, the snap of a twig — is all the more impressive given that it takes a while to warm up to the two souls he cuts loose in those woods.
  51. Executive Decision
    A good, taut movie for red-meat action audiences, but it's not one you will be seeing on an airliner. Not ever.
  52. Call Jane
    Nagy tries to push the story beyond its cautious framing, but it’s tough going.
  53. Joy
    This is one of those pictures where the actors outdo the conventional material they are given to work with.
  54. Dogma
    Smith makes a big, gutsy leap into questions of faith and religion. He miraculously emerges with his humor intact and his wings unsinged.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crocodile Dundee
    Paul Hogan is a delightful Crocodile Dundee. He has an easy, extremely likable screen personality -a mixture of warmth, sex appeal, disarming innocence and dry humor.
  56. 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.
  57. Skin
    Alas, Mr. Fabian, directing his first feature-length fiction film, uses a club whenever a feather would do. He also mishandles the actors, in particular Mr. Neill and Ms. Okonedo, both of whom have been incomparably better elsewhere.
  58. 42
    It is blunt, simple and sentimental, using time-tested methods to teach a clear and rousing lesson.
  59. Disturbia
    There are no big surprises, but the jumps and jolts are well timed and the overall mood is at once grisly and good-natured -- more diverting than disturbing.
  60. California Solo
    A wry, mournful study of midlife crisis.
  61. The Good House
    The trouble with this cinematic Trojan horse is that the superficial blandness dominates the frame. It’s hard to feel the story’s stakes when the images are always indicating no danger ahead.
  62. Jackie Brown
    But for all its enthusiasm, this film isn't sharp enough to afford all the time it wastes on small talk, long drives, trips to the mall and favorite songs played on car radios.
  63. Kabluey
    The film's distance from factual reality oddly enhances its bleak underlying vision. It portrays a demoralized American work force fearfully going through the motions of life while waiting without much hope for things to get better.
  64. Beneath the Harvest Sky
    Beneath the Harvest Sky reaches a dramatic climax that is so rushed and confusing, you are left scratching your head. But for all its missteps, the film feels authentic. Through thick and thin, it stubbornly maintains a thorny integrity.
  65. Totally Killer
    The fun premise can make for a passively enjoyable watch during a Halloween binge, but the film mostly feels like it’s just going through the motions.
  66. When the Sea Rises
    And as you watch her (Moreau) sink into this semiautobiographical role (she was herself a touring performer in the 1980's), the character emerges as a deep, multilayered woman: kind, gentle and happily partaking of life's simple pleasures much of the time, but when necessary, as tough as her stage character through whom she relishes expressing her residual anger at life's hardships and disappointments.
  67. Saving Shiloh
    Touching, intelligent and admirably thoughtful, but more action-packed than its predecessors, thanks to escaped convicts, a local murder and a truly suspenseful finale, with lives at stake.
  68. Princesa
    It could easily have become either prurient or moralistic, but Mr. Goldman's stance is that of a sympathetic observer, and his style combines ground-level realism with a touch of Almodóvarian extravagance.
  69. Piglet's Big Movie
    In the knockabout world of animated movies, Piglet's Big Movie is an oasis of gentleness and wit.
  70. Outside Providence
    Eminently likable...a splendid performance from Alec Baldwin in a far cry from his usual roles.
  71. A Burning Hot Summer
    In A Burning Hot Summer (a pulpy title that sounds better in the original, "Un Été Brûlant), two men fall into friendship, and while little happens, everything is at stake.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Reset
    [A] riveting documentary.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Twins of Evil
    The rest of the costumed crew, led by that veteran horror hand, Peter Cushing, as the twins' witchhunting uncle, who chases the fanged Count and his retinue, hardly give Twins of Evil a good name.
  74. Dual
    There is something insincere in this movie’s manner, an aloofness that masquerades as satire but repels inquiry or emotion. “Dual” takes a worthy idea and throws a smoke bomb in its middle, leaving the audience to squint through the haze.
  75. Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes
    Greystoke is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable films of its kind I've ever seen.
  76. Godzilla
    It is at once bloated and efficient, executed with tremendous discipline and intelligence and conceived with not too much of either.
  77. Love for Sale
    Not half as exotic or as compelling as Mr. Aïnouz’s 2002 film, “Madame Satã,” which examined the fantastic life of a transvestite prostitute and underground entertainer in 1930s and ’40s Rio de Janeiro. But it shares the earlier film’s deep sympathy with sexual free spirits in a rigid macho society.
  78. Jesus Camp
    Jesus Camp doesn't pretend to be a comprehensive survey of the charismatic-evangelical phenomenon. It offers no history or sociology and only scattered statistics about its growth. It analyzes the political agenda only glancingly, centering on abortion but not on homosexuality or other items.
  79. The Discoverers
    Mr. Schwarz falters with his ending, which feels overly tidy. Still, it’s not the destination; it’s the journey.
  80. Wristcutters: A Love Story
    Has an offbeat, absurdist charm that turns a potentially creepy conceit into an odd, touching adventure.
  81. Jacob's Ladder
    The ending of Jacob's Ladder, when it finally arrives, is, like much of the film, both quaint and devastating.
  82. Mr. Toilet: The World's #2 Man
    This is a puff piece of a documentary, eager to spread a message and go down easy.
  83. Cherry Blossoms
    While Ms. Dörrie’s film is exquisitely shot, its themes and metaphors are obvious rather than subtle, and its emotional rhythms -- rueful laughter punctuating the pathos -- would not be out of place in a television drama.
  84. Willow Creek
    Mr. Goldthwait exercises so much caution that you want to get behind his characters and push.
  85. Killer Joe
    Mr. Friedkin, a director with a talent for kinetic screen violence, never finds his groove with Killer Joe, which lurches from realism to corn-pone absurdism and exploitation-cinema surrealism.
  86. The Summer Book
    Scanning the elder woman’s weathered visage and the grandchild’s open face as well as giving the island’s rocky, forested, mossy and watery environs their many close-ups, The Summer Book offers a loving portrait of budding and fading.
  87. Lord of War
    Like everything else in this film, Mr. Cage's performance is watchable if never credible because his director never resolves the disconnect between this star's function (to entertain) and that of his character (to repel).
  88. The Assessment
    A sterile drama about state-controlled procreation, “The Assessment,” the first feature from the French director Fleur Fortuné, is visually stark and emotionally chilling.
  89. Prelude to a Kiss
    This "Prelude to a Kiss" is not only without charm and wit, but it's also clumsily set forth: many people seeing it may wonder what, in heaven's name, is going on.
  90. Dead Man
    The film's energy begins to flag after less than an hour, and as its pulse slackens it turns into a quirky allegory, punctuated with brilliant visionary flashes that partially redeem a philosophic ham-handedness.
  91. Shepherd
    With Shepherd, the Welsh writer and director Russell Owen shows us how to accrue a great deal of atmosphere with very little fuss.
  92. Bitter Moon
    Bitter Moon is, by any reasonable standard, just awful. It's smutty, far-fetched and bizarrely acted, especially by Ms. Seigner, who gives the kind of performance that can only be explained by the fact that she is the director's wife. The good news: Mr. Polanski seems to know all this, and even to encourage it. This material obviously appeals to his sense of mischief, which remains alive and well.
  93. Kon-Tiki
    There’s no denying the real Heyerdahl’s bravery, but if this movie is to be believed, his voyage was largely bereft of tension and interesting conversation.
  94. Loving Vincent
    As the story limps and drags, the viewer also becomes accustomed to the images, and astonishment at the film’s innovative, painstaking technique begins to fade. But its charm never quite wears off, for reasons summed up in the title.
  95. CHAOS: The Manson Murders
    This isn’t just about fringe cults on ranches anymore: It’s about social groups, theories about the world, the bubble you float around in on the internet, the candidate you believe in an election.
  96. The German Doctor
    The Argentine writer and director Lucía Puenzo, shooting in wide screen, takes an effective, largely low-key approach to her fictionalization of Mengele’s time in South America.
  97. Love, Brooklyn
    It has its moments — Nicole and Roger on the steps of her brownstone, for one. And it’s awfully lovely to look at (cinematography by Martim Vian). But, like its characters, it’s a little too comfortable with being betwixt and between.
  98. A Jazzman's Blues
    A Jazzman’s Blues is packed with outsize emotions, but also grand themes.
  99. Young Woman and the Sea
    This is one of those movies that proves, when they’ve got a mind to, they can still make them like they used to.
  100. American Dharma
    Certainly, American Dharma offers no comfort to those disturbed by Bannon or harmed by the policies he has pressed for. But Morris wants to map how Bannon thinks. The movie he has made is less an act of muckraking than it is a psychological thriller, with Bannon its implacable villain.
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