The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,269 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 20269
  2. Mixed: 8,428 out of 20269
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20269
20269 movie reviews
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  1. Rhinegold
    Mixing war movie, coming-of-age drama and gangster thriller, Akin and Hajabi’s screenplay is a dispiriting brew of repellent behavior and odious rap lyrics.
  2. Only the River Flows
    The filmmaker has a gift for disorientation — a chilling cut connects a scene of a pregnancy ultrasound to Ma Zhe flipping through slides of murder evidence — that partly compensates for the muddiness of the plot.
  3. Dìdi
    You get the sense watching Didi that this is a bit of an apology from Wang to his own mother for not seeing her as a real person when he was young. But that isn’t all it is: It’s a funny, heartfelt movie, tapping into the audience’s latent memories as well as our great relief at no longer being 13.
  4. Deadpool & Wolverine
    Deadpool & Wolverine is a “Deadpool” movie, which means it’s rude and irreverent, funny and disgusting, weird and a little sweet. Reynolds and Jackman are fun to watch, in part because their on-screen characters contrast so violently with their nice guy personas off screen.
  5. Find Me Falling
    The writer-director Stelana Kliris is undaunted by, though not entirely in control of, balancing her material’s at times somber, at other times blithe, notes.
  6. Great Absence
    In the end, Great Absence contains the grace that arises from a great struggle.
  7. Hollywoodgate
    The frustration of Hollywoodgate is that it could only ever feel incomplete.
  8. Oddity
    Coolly executed and seductively simple, Oddity, the second feature from Damian McCarthy (after the unsettling, underseen “Caveat” in 2021), is a fun, back-to-basics supernatural thriller that cares more about making us jump than making us cringe.
  9. Join or Die
    Throughout, the film unabashedly adopts Putnam’s doctrine: Become a joiner or democracy is doomed. Some of the film’s points feel simplistic, and questions linger.
  10. Widow Clicquot
    Ambitious as it is in scope, the film is also somewhat charmless and dour, caught between wanting to deliver the passion audiences expect from a period romance and constructing a suspenseful underdog tale. It’s too bad it never finds a winning balance.
  11. Crumb Catcher
    It’s an aspirationally farcical home invasion thriller that never fully thrills, despite a game cast that does its darnedest to liven up an unfocused script — Skotchdopole wrote and edited his film, too — that’s fashioned from genre odds and ends.
  12. Crossing
    In this town, in this movie, you feel absolutely certain each face has its own fascinating story to tell.
  13. Twisters
    It’s loaded with fun and sometimes funny set pieces and enough danger to keep you on your toes.
  14. My Spy: The Eternal City
    Too often this muddled movie, which never really settles on a tone, plays its espionage plot points with a dour seriousness that’s at odds with a teen comedy.
  15. Twice Colonized
    Much like its heroine, Twice Colonized is a storm of emotion and conviction.
  16. Touch
    Touch rekindles a treacly genre that I didn’t realize I missed. Its tender performances and gut-punch reveals are classic tear-jerker ingredients. Add to this a natural, inordinately sensitive approach to intercultural love — mercifully, without a sense of righteousness or obligation.
  17. Sorry/Not Sorry
    An earnest and frustrating documentary.
  18. Fly Me to the Moon
    As the movie progresses, its story grows convoluted and belabored.
  19. Dandelion
    In the end, Dandelion feels like one artist’s emotional prequel, leaving us wishing for even more.
  20. The Convert
    The real star of this Kiwi western is the setting. The lush forests and stark, black sand beaches, shot in locations near those used in “The Piano,” help make The Convert more than a message movie.
  21. Sing Sing
    The cinematography (by Pat Scola) does its own cagey and elegant work, giving Sing Sing an undercurrent shine while evoking the rougher intimacy of a documentary. The movie’s casting — more than 85 percent of the cast participated in Sing Sing’s R.T.A. program — achieves something similar.
  22. Eno
    There’s a pure joy to this documentary, a sense that creativity is miraculous and we ought to be grateful that we get to participate in it. I left both screenings full of ideas for my own work.
  23. Longlegs
    As chilling and stylish as it is, Longlegs is a frustrating pleasure.
  24. Mother, Couch
    Burstyn’s character, which the actor plays with her customary expertise, is so utterly disagreeable that viewing the picture is a mostly anxious experience with not much of a reward at the end, which shifts to magic realist mode for lack of anywhere better to go.
  25. The Imaginary
    The movie falters periodically under the weight of its own dream logic, which can be hard to follow or flimsily constructed as the story gains momentum. But it’s mostly easy to move past those flaws in a work of such rich magical realism and heart.
  26. Kill
    Manipulative to the max (one upsetting murder is almost pornographically protracted), Kill is dizzyingly impressive and punishingly vicious.
  27. MaXXXine
    Darker, moodier and altogether nastier than its predecessors — “X” (2022) and, later that same year, “Pearl” — this hyperconfident feature is also funny, occasionally wistful and deeply empathetic toward its damaged, driven heroine.
  28. Despicable Me 4
    There’s still occasional fun to be had and a budget that’s clearly put to use, but we’re mostly here, it seems, to keep the Minion cash cow chugging along.
  29. Space Cadet
    The jokes feel tired. The actors are mostly doing their best, but the screenplay too often leaves them mimicking comedy rather than performing it.
  30. This Closeness
    The film’s stripped-down aesthetic is mirrored in the actors’ performances; they deliver straightforward lines with a hint of self-consciousness and discomfort, even between friends and lovers. It’s as if the closeness is projected through a scrim, which creates a kind of purposeful clumsiness the audience can feel, too. When actual physical contact occurs, it’s almost jarring.
  31. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
    While this installment isn’t nearly as woeful as Beverly Hills Cop III, it doesn’t have the charm or energy of the first two films either. It’s a limp, desperate action comedy with few memorable moments.
  32. Copa 71
    Copa 71 is engrossing, but it struck me that like another documentary about a forgotten moment in history — the Oscar-winning “Summer of Soul” (2021) — this movie reveals the power of recording history for future generations.
  33. How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer
    I expect every viewer of How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer will have some quibble with it, but it’s an accomplishment nonetheless — a model for how to reimagine a standard documentary structure to accommodate a multifaceted subject without smoothing over the rough spots and slapping on a halo.
  34. A Family Affair
    King is not exactly outclassed by Nicole Kidman, Kathy Bates and Zac Efron. But the movie’s script, by Carrie Solomon, puts her at a disadvantage.
  35. A Quiet Place: Day One
    It is at its very best whenever Nyong’o’s face fills the screen, like the postapocalyptic heroine of a silent movie. What she can do with relatively little is simply astonishing, and you absolutely believe in both Samira’s despair and her determination. Nyong’o has created a woman whose life force can never be fully extinguished.
  36. Chronicles of a Wandering Saint
    The superior second half, in which Rita’s reality is upended, eases into a realm of fantasy that is admirable — and more effective — because of its uncanny, inventive minimalism.
  37. Daddio
    Somehow, Penn never allows Clark’s inappropriateness to become predatory, and Johnson’s marvelously expressive features reveal details the dialogue declines to provide. Yet if there’s a finer point to any of this — beyond yes, talking to strangers is sometimes beneficial — it eluded me.
  38. 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.
  39. June Zero
    The shifting story, written by Paltrow and Tom Shoval, complicates the act of commemoration and dwells on the moral quandaries and uncomfortable resonances that result from the events.
  40. The Vourdalak
    Surrender to its vintage vibe and its emotional kick may surprise you.
  41. Music
    Hope was never something that I associated with Schanelec’s typically dour films, yet here, from the darkness of a timeless tragedy emerges light.
  42. Confessions of a Good Samaritan
    What begins as an optimistic piece of advocacy eventually veers into something more complex, ambivalent and even frantic.
  43. Last Summer
    Last Summer is complex, tricky, at times very uncomfortable and thoroughly engrossing.
  44. Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
    It’s easy to smirk at these and other miscues; Costner also has a weakness for speeches, like many filmmakers. But he has a feel for the western and the landscapes of the West, and among the good scenes mixed in with the groaners is a beautifully filmed chase set against a midnight-blue sky that finds two riders galloping after a third, who changes horses mid-chase.
  45. I Am: Celine Dion
    These awkward segments weaken the powerful emotional atmosphere of witnessing Dion transcend her circumstances. Especially when she lets the cameras stick around, showing some of the most grim health-related scenes I have ever seen of a superstar onscreen.
  46. Green Border
    The fury that radiates off Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border is so intense that you can almost feel it encasing you in its heat.
  47. Hummingbirds
    Hummingbirds is pretty tight filmmaking at less than 80 minutes, and the laid-back presentation makes the political commentary register strongly from the periphery.
  48. Thelma
    Margolin’s empathy for Thelma (he based the story on a scam perpetrated on his own grandmother) lends the film a sweetness and occasional poignancy that help mitigate much of the foolishness.
  49. The Devil's Bath
    The film is grounded in a harrowing historical reality, about the terrifying lengths to which women will go to liberate themselves from destructive domestic conditions. Franz and Fiala bring out this reality’s latent horrors through a series of suspense-building strategies.
  50. Kinds of Kindness
    It’s a triptych that at first seems slight, then gains meaning the longer you hold its three seemingly disconnected short films in juxtaposition and peer through the overlaps.
  51. Janet Planet
    Janet Planet is a tiny masterpiece, and it’s so carefully constructed, so loaded with details and emotions and gentle comedy, that it’s impossible to shake once it gets under your skin.
  52. Black Barbie: A Documentary
    On the surface, the documentary is about what led to the 1980 release of Black Barbie, but the issues it explores run much deeper: the harm of lacking a “social mirror,” the slow pace of progress and the tensions around darkening a white fictional character.
  53. Federer: Twelve Final Days
    Federer describes himself as an emotional guy, but with the international press and his management team nearly always on the sidelines, there’s little privacy to get personal.
  54. The Bikeriders
    Not much happens, but the people are beautiful and so too are their bikes, rumbling beasts that tribe members ride and ride on that familiar closed loop known as Nowheresville, U.S.A.
  55. The Exorcism
    There’s a bizarrely choppy feel to the movie, as if an hour or so had been pulled out in an attempt to slim down an overstuffed story. This throws off the rhythm, stripping the film of its tension and frequently leaving us wondering what’s going on, and not in the good, creepy way.
  56. Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution
    Throughout the film, Hurwitz showcases comedy as more than just a source of laughter, but of healing, catharsis and as an agent for queer liberation, particularly during the Stonewall riots in 1969 and, later, the AIDS epidemic.
  57. Ride
    Only Howell truly embodies the spirit of the Old West.
  58. Tiger Stripes
    Occasionally the movie feels like it’s lost its direction, stuffing a little too much into its story and deflating the ferocity of its central metaphor. But there’s a great sense of humor in Tiger Stripes, particularly in Zairizal’s impish performance, and the swing between fear and hilarity make for an engrossing ride.
  59. Firebrand
    Law (and his director, Karim Aïnouz) might be laying it on thick, but his grotesque tyrant is the only thing lifting this dreary, ahistoric drama out of its narrative doldrums.
  60. Reverse the Curse
    Duchovny’s smarts are commendable, theoretically, but the movie falls short of compelling. And for all the novelistic details that he packs in, Reverse the Curse moves at the pace of a self-defeating snail.
  61. Summer Solstice
    A triumph of sensitivity.
  62. Treasure
    Whatever complexities might come across in the book don’t register in a film that has been fashioned, sometimes uneasily, into a sentimental father-daughter road movie.
  63. Ghostlight
    It’s a gentle story, full of tender moments, and knowing that the parents and daughter in the main cast are a family in real life increases the warmth.
  64. Ultraman: Rising
    If Ultraman wants to conquer the world, he’ll have to try something livelier than a cartoon that looks like a kids movie but lurches about like a saccharine family drama.
  65. Brats
    The film’s through-line of woundedness is by turns touching, irritating and occasionally illuminating.
  66. Inside Out 2
    Franchises often bank on nostalgia, so it’s easy to fall for “Inside Out 2,” which works largely because the first one does wonderfully well. The new movie conforms to the original’s ethos as well as inventive template, its conceit and visual design, so its pleasures are agreeably familiar.
  67. Bad Boys: Ride or Die
    This violent franchise has rarely felt so assured, so relaxed and knowingly funny.
  68. How to Rob a Bank
    There’s quite a bit to chew on in this story, matters the film points to but doesn’t really examine.
  69. The Watchers
    The film is a little bit frightening and a big bit comically grandiose.
  70. Taking Venice
    It’s still fascinating to imagine a time, not all that long ago, in which painting, sculpture, jazz, literature and more were considered keys to the exporting of American influence around the world.
  71. Songs of Earth
    It’s an altogether extraordinary film, one I’ve thought about often since I first saw it, and I’m delighted that it’s playing in theaters — the immersive nature of the sounds, music and landscapes are worth experiencing with the full concentration a cinema affords.
  72. Babes
    There’s substance here, and talent in spades, but it needed a little more time to gestate.
  73. Back to Black
    That a movie messes with the historical record a little doesn’t automatically make it bad. But in Back to Black the omissions feel downright weird, as if something is being ignored.
  74. 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.
  75. Am I OK?
    The movie feels very lived-in, the banter fresh and funny, even if sometimes it feels like it’s standing in place a bit too long
  76. Tuesday
    Without much to distract from the three central characters, Tuesday can feel overlong and a little claustrophobic. Yet this compassionate fairy tale works because the actors are so in sync and the imagery — as in one shot of the bird curled like an apostrophe in a dead woman’s tear duct — is often magical.
  77. I Used to Be Funny
    The perceptive dramedy I Used to Be Funny features a mic-drop performance by Rachel Sennott as a rising stand-up comedian derailed by a vague, internet-viral crime.
  78. Longing
    Plausibility complaints always feel cheap, but Longing strains credulity well past the breaking point.
  79. Let the Canary Sing
    This violent franchise has rarely felt so assured, so relaxed and knowingly funny. If Bad Boys: Ride or Die means that Smith, post-slap, will remain a bad boy for life, there are worse punishments to endure.
  80. Backspot
    Its early execution strains and wobbles some, but “Backspot” sticks its landing.
  81. Ezra
    What keeps the story sweet is the chemistry between Cannavale and Fitzgerald, who build a bond worth cherishing.
  82. The Great Lillian Hall
    Like many of the best golden-age melodramas, this HBO film fully commits to both unabashed emotion and a complicated female lead, a role filled by Jessica Lange with a finely tuned mix of showmanship and nuance.
  83. The Young Wife
    These are familiar, even hackneyed themes, which make the film’s relentless theatrics feel gratuitous and somewhat exhausting. Style overpowers substance, though Poe’s fantastic eye for composition and Clemons’s vivacious screen presence are undeniable.
  84. In a Violent Nature
    Claiming inspiration (in the film’s press notes) from Terrence Malick and others, Nash has attempted an ambitious blend of art house and slaughterhouse whose rug-pulling ending will polarize, even as its moody logic prevails.
  85. The Dead Don't Hurt
    Mortensen’s ambitions may be old-fashioned, but they’re grand ambitions, and he has realized them in a handsome passion project.
  86. HAIKYU!! The Dumpster Battle
    Though “The Dumpster Battle” is squarely aimed toward fans of the series, it has charms that may lead new viewers to the anime (streaming on Crunchyroll and Netflix) to follow the story from the beginning. Because even if crows and cats battling in a dumpster doesn’t appeal to you, there’s still the promise of watching good athletes play a good game — and that’s worth a seat in the bleachers.
  87. Handling the Undead
    There are times when the film veers too near the maudlin for comfort, but it always finds its way back to something spare and meaningful.
  88. Robot Dreams
    To describe the plot — a dog and a robot are best friends, until they aren’t — the film sounds pitifully small. But the world inside it feels huge, a sprawling landscape of joy and heartbreak and mixed emotions and stinging dead ends.
  89. 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.
  90. MoviePass, MovieCrash
    Surprisingly, the film goes much further than expected. Streaming services are loaded with documentaries about scammy internet-era companies, but “MoviePass, MovieCrash” finds the barely told story in all the juicy facts.
  91. Atlas
    Science fiction often earns its place in memory by envisioning something new and startling — but with Atlas, we’ve seen it all before.
  92. The Beach Boys
    Any deviations from the film’s obligatory timeline tour are very welcome, like a mortifying studio recording of Murry holding forth, and it’s a treat to hear the esteem for Brian among the Wrecking Crew, the storied group of session musicians.
  93. Solo
    Simon’s drag spectacles may be intentionally fierce and operatic, but there’s something refreshing about this drama’s intimate scale and lack of interest in sweeping tragedies, especially in the context of queer cinema.
  94. Queen of the Deuce
    The style is stilted, the look rudimentary, with Abhilasha Dewan’s cheeky animation supplying an occasional visual lift. Yet as Wilson’s former errand boy guides us around her onetime fiefdom — conjuring an area fizzing with smut until doused by Giuliani — we may sense the milieu, but its matriarch remains stubbornly indistinct.
  95. Sight
    All of this is laid out in competent commonplace fashion, with the principal actors Terry Chen, Greg Kinnear and the always welcome Fionnula Flanagan displaying the expected professionalism.
  96. The Garfield Movie
    It’s a Garfield movie that strangely doesn’t feel as if Garfield as we know him is really there at all.
  97. Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara
    One gets the sense that the director, in not wanting to rob the adult Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese) of his agency, even if it was woefully compromised, resorts to a horror-inflected score and overdramatic scenes of parental anguish to make clear the devastating consequences of a child separated from his family. The heightened drama seems hardly necessary.
  98. Hit Man
    It’s radiant and loose and confident, the kind of movie that you can just tell was a blast to make, which makes it a blast to watch. As our overstuffed big-budget era starts to falter, let’s hope they start making movies like this again.
  99. Megalopolis
    In the end, what matters is the movie, a brash, often beautiful, sometimes clotted, nakedly personal testament. It’s a little nuts, but our movies could use more craziness, more passion, feeling and nerve. They could use a lot more of the love that Coppola has for cinema, which he continues to pry from the industry’s death grip by insisting that film is art.
  100. Film Geek
    I appreciate Shepard’s affection: I also grew up loving movies, and I found his wistful reminiscences of being awed by “Jaws” and “Star Wars” relatable. But Shepard’s level of self-regard can be stultifying.
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