The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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: 9,377 out of 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. Lake Tahoe
    Exquisitely captured in natural light by the cinematographer Alexis Zabé, Juan’s journey is framed by sherbet-colored houses and lemon sidewalks, dipping palm fronds and a burnished, turquoise horizon. The director calls his style "artisan cinema"; I just call it dreamy.
  2. Lorna's Silence
    Lorna's Silence is engrossing and powerful, which may be just another way of saying it's a film by the Dardenne brothers. If it falls a bit short of the standards of their best work, that is only because it is not quite a masterpiece.
  3. Beeswax
    Beeswax, at first glance a modest, ragged slice of contemporary life, turns out to be a remarkably subtle, even elegant movie.
  4. The Baader Meinhof Complex
    A taut, unnerving, forcefully unromantic fictional film.
  5. Crude
    Ahead of us lie many more documentaries similar in tone and spirit to this one. We can hope that at least a few of them are as intelligently and artfully made.
  6. Splice
    Mr. Natali, whose earlier films include “Cube,” hasn’t reinvented the horror genre. But with Splice he has done the next best thing with an intelligent movie that, in between its small boos and an occasional hair-raising jolt, explores chewy issues like bioethics, abortion, corporate-sponsored science, commitment problems between lovers and even Freudian-worthy family dynamics.
  7. Disgrace
    Mr. Malkovich is one of the few actors capable of conveying genuine intellectual depth.
  8. The Nightmare Before Christmas
    The Nightmare Before Christmas is a major step forward for both stop-motion animation, which is stunningly well used, and for Mr. Burton himself. He now moves from the level of extremely talented eccentric to that of Disney-style household word.
  9. The Sun
    The movie is best understood not in banal docudrama terms but as an impressionistic portrait of a man who, stripped of power, is revealed as grotesquely human.
  10. The Secret of Kells
    It is only fitting that a movie concerned with the power and beauty of drawing -- the almost sacred magic of color and line -- should be so gorgeously and intricately drawn.
  11. Mother
    The hard-pounding heart of Mother, Ms. Kim is a wonderment. Perched on the knife edge between tragedy and comedy, her delivery gives the narrative -- which tends to drift, sometimes beguilingly, sometimes less so -- much of its momentum.
  12. Mid-August Lunch
    A slender Chekhovian vignette about the joys and regrets of old age and the pleasures of sociability.
  13. Greenberg
    It is the funniest and saddest movie Mr. Baumbach has made so far, and also the riskiest.
  14. Close-Up
    It is Mr. Sabzian's poignancy that makes "Close-Up" much more than a clever reflection on film-versus-life as an endless hall of mirrors.
  15. The Town Is Quiet
    You are left with an overall impression of a movie so full of life that it is almost bursting at the seams.
  16. Bartleby
    Mr. Parker has brilliantly updated his source and grasped its essence, composing a sorrowful and hilarious tone poem about alienated labor, or an absurdist workplace sitcom, as if a team of French surrealists had been put in charge of "The Drew Carey Show."
  17. Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee
    In an era whose culture was defined by what the literary critic Richard Poirier called the performing self, Mr. Ali's persona was one of the greatest performances of all.
  18. Life and Debt
    Offers the clearest analysis of globalization and its negative effects that I've ever seen on a movie or television screen.
  19. Me You Them
    An unexpected delight, a film that weds the humor and magic of a folk tale with a very modern feel for the psychological dynamics between men and women and for the subtle politics of male rivalry in a macho culture. It has been made and acted with intelligence and evident love, which deserves to be requited.
  20. The Luzhin Defence
    Moves with fluidity and ease through brisk opening conventions to a perfectly poised and balanced endgame.
  21. Down from the Mountain
    If you have any affection at all for traditional American music, the movie itself -- is pretty close to heaven.
  22. La Ciénaga
    As La Ciénaga perspires from the screen, it creates a vision of social malaise that feels paradoxically familiar and new.
  23. Paragraph 175
    At once admirable and deeply unsettling.
  24. Under the Sand
    Mr. Ozon gives the movie to Ms. Rampling, whose performance is like a perfectly executed piano etude, finding precise, impossibly subtle shadings of pleasure, confusion and distress.
  25. 42: Forty Two Up
    When this hugely ambitious project began, it was a longitudinal study of class divisions among English schoolchildren. But time and persistence have turned it into much more.
  26. Winter Sleepers
    Winter Sleepers has many such breathtaking moments in which sounds and images synergize with an explosive precision.
  27. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    One of the funniest, and most telling, films of the year. The filmmakers call "Kid" a documentary, but the movie is one of the unusual kind that is firmly lodged inside the subject's perspective.
  28. Voyages
    This movie operates in the limbo between memory and oblivion that we recognize as daily life. It bears courageous and stringent witness to the impossibility of bearing witness.
  29. The Brothers McMullen
    This modest, enormously likable film, about love and temptation and ties that bind, is about brotherhood most of all. [9 August 1995, p.C9]
  30. Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember
    A fine and loving memorial that preserves his charm, his intellect and his splendid body of work.
  31. Grateful Dawg
    Quite simply a treat for the ear.
  32. Baran
    The lovely clarity of this story, which seems to have been drawn from the literature of an earlier age, is well served by the artful subtlety of the telling. Mr. Majidi prefers imagery to exposition, and his shots are as dense with meaning, and as readily accessible, as Dutch paintings.
  33. Notorious C.H.O.
    Brilliant, over-the-edge concert film Notorious C.H.O. carries candid sexual humor into previously uncharted territory.
  34. Beautiful People
    Is, in the end, a boisterous love song -- a funny valentine to London, to chaos and to human decency.
  35. Solas
    Galiana's quietly monumental performance is one for the ages.
  36. Little Otik
    A handmade dream, cobbled together from dirt, wood and more imagination than most of us can muster in our most fevered states. Because this Czech master refuses to work in the scrubbed, antiseptic manner of most animators, this fable comes to life as hilarious and creepy.
  37. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    So good because it is one of those rare documentaries that combine information with smashing entertainment.
  38. Heaven
    Here the clinical, stopwatch precision of Mr. Tykwer's explorations of synchronicity and Kieslowski's warmer, metaphysically dreamy speculations about the role of chance and coincidence in human affairs synchronize into a film whose formal elegance is matched by its depth of feeling.
  39. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    The cumulative effect is that of watching misspent lives disintegrate before your eyes. Ms. Miller's canny accomplishment is a triumph, giving the material weight and heart. This is one of the finest pictures of the year.
  40. Water Drops on Burning Rocks
    A brilliant satire of emotional politics.
  41. The Day I Became a Woman
    What appears on the screen has a starkness that is almost indelible.
  42. Dream of Light
    The purity and breadth of this meticulous study are all the more gratifying in view of its unprepossessing style.
  43. Dinner Rush
    Serves up its scattershot plots as if they were lined up on a menu, moving from appetizer to entree: there are more intrigues here than in the court of the Medicis.
  44. Girls Can't Swim
    Ultimately lacks the epic dimension of "Y Tu Mamá También," but its vision of that awkward age when sex threatens to overwhelm everything else is acute enough to make everyone who has been there squirm with recognition.
  45. Grin Without a Cat
    A Grin Without a Cat is a work of extraordinary journalism, but it is also a work of deft and subtle poetry, visual (in the rhyming of gestures and shapes across images and sequences) as much as verbal.
  46. Gun Shy
    One of the most subtle and inspired comedies you'll see this year.
  47. Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
    The film they have put together is dense with sound and information, but it moves with a swift, lilting rhythm that is of a piece with the musical heritage it explores.
  48. Billy Liar (re-release)
    One of the great movies of the 1960's, but it has been, in this country at least, maddeningly elusive. In spite of its bitter edge, Billy Liar is pure Ambrosia.
  49. Madadayo
    It's not one of Kurosawa's great films.... But it is, within its own proportions, nearly perfect.
  50. Metropolis (re-release)
    Metropolis retains its power to overwhelm, trouble and move because it is connected to the deep anxieties of modern life as if by a high-voltage cable.
  51. The Lady and the Duke
    The director manages to evade both the stuffy antiquarianism and the pandering anachronism that subvert so many cinematic attempts at historical inquiry.
  52. War Photographer
    Documenting war is a small, partial but indispensable step toward its eventual eradication. Mr. Frei's quiet, engrossing film is a sad and stirring testimony to this vision and to the quiet, self-effacing heroism with which Mr. Nachtwey has pursued it.
  53. Late Marriage
    Powerful and very bitter comedy.
  54. The Nazi Officer's Wife
    Packed with revelations and withheld information that comes to life; it is like an old movie castle full of false fireplaces and trap doors.
  55. The Gleaners & I
    She (Varda) plucks images and stories from the world around her, finding beauty and nourishment in lives and activities the world prefers to ignore.
  56. Outside Providence
    Eminently likable...a splendid performance from Alec Baldwin in a far cry from his usual roles.
  57. Lumumba
    Mr. Peck's gambit works, and the result is a great film and a great performance.
  58. Waking Ned Devine
    Kirk Jones, who wrote and directed this blithe comedy, has been a prize-winning director of television commercials. And he has the knack of finding rubbery, expressive faces and letting each villager's quirks emerge on cue.
  59. The Circle
    The political implications of the film are manifest, as is the quiet courage of making it.
  60. Ulee's Gold
    Beautiful and heartfelt, an oasis of humanity in a season of furious hyperbole.
  61. Pleasantville
    Ingenious fantasy.
  62. Four Weddings and a Funeral
    Elegant, festive and very, very funny.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The French Connection
    The French Connection is a film of almost incredible suspense, and it includes, among a great many chilling delights, the most brilliantly executed chase sequence I have ever seen. [8 October 1971]
  64. Fever
    Every shot seems measured for maximum effect, and when the pace suddenly quickens in a late action sequence on a deserted subway train, it results in a moment of pure Hitchcockian panic that reverberates like thunder in the fretful, melancholy air.
  65. Repo Man
    The real thing. It's a sneakily rude, truly zany farce that treats its lunatic characters with a solemnity that perfectly matches the way in which they see themselves.
  66. ABC Africa
    You come away from his film overwhelmed, hopeful and, perhaps paradoxically, illuminated.
  67. Dead Ringers
    What makes the performance(s) even better is that Mr. Irons invests these bizarre, potentially freakish characters with so much intelligence and so much real feeling.
  68. The Deep End
    Fastidious and smart, and Ms. Swinton's fixated intensity isn't ever remote; we're always aware of how deeply she's feeling. Her work is magnificent.
  69. The Last Days of Disco
    Humorously and fondly, with an entertaining supply of what he has called "prosaic license," Stillman again displays a pitch-perfect ear for both the cattiness and the camaraderie that bind his characters into collective friendship.
  70. Shanghai Noon
    A refreshing movie that's so good natured, so confident of its ability to provoke not queasy awe or numb exhaustion but pure delight.
  71. Northfork
    There is nothing quite like this movie, and I'm not altogether sure there is much more to it than its lovely peculiarity. But at a moment when so many films strive to be obvious and interchangeable as possible, it is gratifying to find one that is puzzling, subtle and handmade.
  72. The Deer Hunter
    A big, awkward, crazily ambitious, sometimes breathtaking motion picture that comes as close to being a popular epic as any movie about this country since "The Godfather."
  73. The Man Without a Past
    Like the great films of the 1930's and early 40's, it is at once artful and unpretentious, sophisticated and completely accessible, sure of its own authority and generous toward characters and audience alike -- a movie whose intended public is the human race.
  74. The Joy Luck Club
    Those unfamiliar with the book will simply appreciate a stirring, many-sided fable, one that is exceptionally well told.
  75. Two Family House
    Experience filmgoing joy.
  76. Heist
    Heist is a pleasure to watch, and the greatest pleasure is to watch Mr. Lindo and Mr. Hackman steal it.
  77. The Player
    So entertaining, so flip and so genially irreverent that it seems to announce the return of the great gregarious film maker whose "Nashville" remains one of the classics of the 1970's.
  78. Velvet Goldmine
    Brilliantly reimagines the glam-rock 70's as a brave new world of electrifying theatricality and sexual possibility, to the point where identifying precise figures in this neo-psychedelic landscape is almost beside the point.
  79. Nurse Betty
    It is easily the finest American comedy since David O. Russell's "Flirting With Disaster," another road movie that never ran out of poignantly funny surprises.
  80. The Man Who Wasn't There
    The Coens have used the noir idiom to fashion a haunting, beautifully made movie that refers to nothing outside itself and that disperses like a vapor as soon as it's over.
  81. Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
    Thrillingly smart, but not, like so many other pictures in this vein, merely an elaborate excuse for its own cleverness. As you puzzle over the intricacies of its shape, which reveal themselves only in retrospect, you may also find yourself surprised by the depth of its insights.
  82. The Rookie
    Scene by scene, The Rookie does a better job of capturing the rhythms and rituals of the playing field and the electricity that flows between a team and its fans than well-regarded baseball films like "Field of Dreams" and "The Natural."
  83. Humanité
    You probably won't feel comfortable when Humanité is over, but as you leave the theater you will feel more alive than when you entered.
  84. Field of Dreams
    A work so smartly written, so beautifully filmed, so perfectly acted, that it does the almost impossible trick of turning sentimentality into true emotion.
  85. Donnie Brasco
    Crackling good... the best crime movie in a long while.
  86. Traffic
    May be the first Hollywood movie since Robert Altman's "Nashville" to infuse epic cinematic form with jittery new rhythms and a fresh, acid- washed palette.
  87. Love and Diane
    What lifts the film above many other high-minded documentaries dealing with poverty and the welfare cycle is this filmmaker's astounding empathy for both Diane and Love.
  88. The Clay Bird
    Easily one of the finest pictures of 2003 or any other year.
  89. Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion
    A more concise and affecting summation of the Tibetan crisis would be hard to imagine.
  90. Tarzan
    It proves to be one of the more exotic blooms in the Disney hothouse, what with voluptuous flora, hordes of fauna, charming characters and excitingly kinetic animation that gracefully incorporates computer-generated motion.
  91. Together
    One of the most pleasant foreign films of the year, a funny, graceful and immensely good-natured work.
  92. Timecode
    It's amazing to see a film so brazenly experimental, so committed to reflecting on the circumstances and techniques of its making, that is at the same time so intent upon delivering old-fashioned cinematic pleasures like humor and pathos, character and plot.
  93. Lawless Heart
    By allowing the stories to play off one another and allowing layers of meaning to accumulate before we even notice them, the filmmakers capture some of the essential strangeness of life -- the way our relations are governed by laws that remain invisible to us until art reveals their workings.
  94. Jerry Maguire
    Jerry Maguire is loaded with them: bright, funny, tender encounters between characters who seem so winningly warm and real.
  95. A Few Good Men
    A big commercial entertainment of unusually satisfying order. [11 Dec 1992]
    • The New York Times
  96. Seven Samurai
    On that simple framework and familiar story line, director Kurosawa has plastered a wealth of rich detail, which brilliantly illuminates his characters and the kind of action in which they are involved. He has loaded his film with unusual and exciting physical incidents and made the whole thing graphic in a hard, realistic western style.
  97. Frailty
    Paxton's Dad may be the most terrifying father to appear in a horror film since Jack Nicholson went crazily homicidal in "The Shining."
  98. Twelve Monkeys
    Fierce and disturbing, with a plot that skillfully resists following any familiar course. The film's hero fears that he's half-crazy, and for two hours Mr. Gilliam artfully keeps his audience feeling the same way.
  99. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [re-release]
    Although Mr. Petri quite consciously makes movies about ideas, he has, in his "Investigation," made a movie in which the ideas, and the man who seethes with them, have the shock and impact of the most fundamental kind of melodrama.
  100. The Son
    To call The Son a masterpiece would be to insult its modesty. Like the homely, useful boxes Olivier teaches his prodigals to build, it is sturdy, durable and, in its downcast, unobtrusive way, miraculous.
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