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. Varda by Agnès
    It’s a perfect introduction and a lovely valediction.
  2. Wood and Water
    With a kind of dissociative, jet lag-induced delirium, the film transitions — somehow fluidly — from the lush woodlands and desolate churches of southern Germany to the flickering lights and modernist textures of Hong Kong in the throes of mass demonstrations.
  3. Out of the Past
    The style is still sharp and realistic, the dialogue still crackles with verbal sparks and the action is still crisp and muscular, not to mention slightly wanton in spots. But the pattern and purpose of it is beyond our pedestrian ken.
  4. The Delinquents
    The Delinquents wants to live modestly. It’s less concerned with satisfying the expectations of its genre than in finding waggish ways to deviate from them. To the film’s thinking, narrative is only a construct.
  5. Close Your Eyes
    Close Your Eyes has its virtues, certainly, including some pleasurably loose interludes at the beachfront compound where Miguel lives. These have a delicate, unforced quality that creates pinpricks of light in a movie that, as it struggles to engage meaningfully with the past, sinks into ponderousness.
  6. Lakota Nation vs. United States
    This stunning film, directed by Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli, interleaves interviews of Lakota activists and elders with striking images of the Black Hills and its wildlife, historical documents and news reports, clips from old movies and other archival footage to extraordinary effect, demonstrating not only the physical and cultural violence inflicted on the Lakota but also their deep connection to the Black Hills, the area where Mount Rushmore was erected.
  7. Cactus Pears
    While the film centers on the comfort Anand finds with Balya and vice versa, it is also an elegantly reserved study of Anand’s grief, finding a rhythm in its scenes of ritual that allows us to ache alongside.
  8. Eighth Grade
    Eighth Grade is a simple story of an unremarkable girl, tenderly and movingly told.
  9. Exit Through the Gift Shop
    Exit could be a new subgenre: the prankumentary. Audiences, however, would be advised simply to enjoy the film on its face -- even if that face is a carefully contrived mask.
  10. Kings & Queen
    Late in his new film Kings and Queen, the wildly gifted French director Arnaud Desplechin yanks the rug from under his characters and sends both them and us reeling.
  11. Sling Blade
    Thornton is sadly affecting in the film's central role.
  12. The Novice
    Fuhrman’s performance matches the filmmaking for its intensity. The movie achieves a surreal allure — at times, it’s hard to pay attention to the dialogue because the images and the sound design are already communicating so much.
  13. Girlhood
    Even as she stops at familiar stations on the road to maturity — problems at home and school, new friendships and first love — Ms. Sciamma revels in the risky, reckless exuberance of adolescence and in the sheer joy of filming it.
  14. Let's Get Lost
    Chet Baker's face, and the extraordinary ways in which Bruce Weber has photographed it, encapsulate the story of Baker's life in a succession of ghostly, indelible images that are at once hauntingly beautiful and desperately sad.
  15. Offside
    While the gist of Offside is the same (as "The Circle"), its tone is more insouciant, as it celebrates the guile and toughness of its heroines while casting a sympathetic glance at the ethical quandaries facing their jailers.
  16. Kiki's Delivery Service
    A conventional but delightful tale of self-discovery and heroism from Mr. Miyazaki, it feels like Disney one moment, Truffaut the next.
  17. The Ornithologist
    Mr. Rodrigues ultimately delivers an intriguing, daring film that is likely to surprise both his fans and moviegoers unfamiliar with his work.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    El Dorado
    The taut guidance of Mr. Hawks, an old frontier hand, the barbed, pungent and frequently funny dialogue, plus some murderous gun forays, add up to crisp entertainment
  19. Sleeping Beauty
    A crisply stylized fairyland, where the colors are rich, the sounds are luscious and magic sparkles spurt charmingly from wands.
  20. Mona Lisa
    NEIL JORDAN'S Mona Lisa is classy kitsch. It's as smooth and distinctive (and, ultimately, as insubstantial) as the old Nat (King) Cole recording of the song, which gives the film its title and a lot of its mood. It's also got high style, so you needn't hate yourself for liking it.
  21. A Nice Indian Boy
    In this vibrant addition to cinema’s romantic landscape, love isn’t the only winner: cultural understanding and the freedom to choose your own path triumph as well.
  22. Easy Rider
    With the exception of Nicholson, its good things are familiar things - the rock score, the lovely, sometimes impressionistic photography by Laszlo Kovacs, the faces of small-town America.
  23. Princess
    Thanks to Ms. Haas’s truly remarkable lead performance (she was 16 at the time of filming) and Ms. Shalom-Ezer’s nuanced dialogue, Adar’s journey finally feels more like one of empowerment than victimization.
  24. Knocked Up
    An instant classic, a comedy that captures the sexual confusion and moral ambivalence of our moment without straining, pandering or preaching.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Quiet Man
    Let's face it. Mr. Ford is in love with Ireland, as is his cast, and they give us a fine, gay time while they're about it.
  26. Turtles Can Fly
    It is a heartbreaking film, and cruelty sometimes seems to be not only its subject but its method. Like the child on a high cliff that is one of its recurring images, the film walks up to the edge of hopelessness and pauses there, waiting to see what happens next.
  27. The Departed
    What helps make The Departed at once a success and a relief isn't that the director of "Kundun," Mr. Scorsese's deeply felt film about the Dalai Lama, is back on the mean streets where he belongs; what's at stake here is the film and the filmmaking, not the director's epic importance.
  28. Yes
    Yes is an unsparing movie and can be hard to watch partly because Lapid’s raw fury and maximalist approach can border on off-putting excess. There are times in “Yes” when he seems to be veering out of control. At other times, he almost seems to bait you to look away, to turn off and tune out just like his revelers, even as he inexorably pulls you in, forcing you to bear witness alongside him.
  29. Festival Express
    To watch the biggest stars of their time in casual conversation, trading riffs and passing bottles, without benefit of publicists, handlers and security goons is to relive an innocent, anarchic time in the entertainment business when music, not marketing, was at the center of the enterprise.
  30. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
    An exquisitely simple movie. Mr. Kim manages to isolate something essential about human nature and at the same time, even more astonishingly, to comprehend the scope of human experience.
  31. April and the Extraordinary World
    Influences aside, the movie so teems with delightful detail and has such an exuberant sense of play that it feels entirely fresh.
  32. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    A pleasurably sly and involving puzzler - a mystery about mysteries within mysteries.
  33. The Wild Robot
    The movie is a dazzling triumph of animation in which you feel the filmmakers’ attention on every frame. In a revivifying turn away from the gag-a-minute, computer-generated extravaganzas clogging up the animated zoological canon, this is a work that cares most about two things: big feelings and great beauty.
  34. Harakiri
    You may not get much satisfaction from the tortured human drama in this film, but you should get an eyeful graphic exercise.
  35. A Poet
    The writer and director Simón Mesa Soto skewers with knowing precision a kind of devotion to the creative life — without much of the creating — that renders one useless in the real world. The allure of the image of the tortured artist can be so enticing that it obscures the actual art.
  36. Support the Girls
    Mr. Bujalski, who wrote as well as directed, doesn’t lean on shocks and big moments to spark tension or spur the narrative. A fine-grain realist, he creates modest, layered worlds and identifiably true characters, filling them in with details borrowed from life rather than the multiplex.
  37. Half Nelson
    What makes Half Nelson both an unusual and an exceptional American film, particularly at a time when even films about Sept. 11 are professed to have no politics, is its insistence on political consciousness as a moral imperative.
  38. Cat People
    The Cat People is a labored and obvious attempt to induce shock. And Miss Simone's cuddly little tabby would barely frighten a mouse under a chair.
  39. Vincere
    A sustained, alternatingly exhausting and aesthetically exhilarating howl of a film.
  40. The Fabulous Baker Boys
    It's a film specializing in smoky, down-at-the-heels glamour, and in the kind of smart, slangy dialogue that sounds right without necessarily having much to say.
  41. The Insider
    Is still sleek, gripping entertainment with a raw-nerved, changeable camera style that helps to amplify its meaning.
  42. 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.
  43. Victim
    As a straight piece of blackmail melodrama, it is a good bit below the British par. But as a frank and deliberate exposition of the well-known presence and plight of the tacit homosexual in modern society it is certainly unprecedented and intellectually bold.
  44. 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.
  45. About Schmidt
    What makes this exquisitely observed slice of American screen realism transcend itself is finally its moral sensibility.
  46. Domestic Violence
    The picture itself is about, yes, cycles, and as tiresome as that sounds, 10 minutes into the film you'll be white-knuckled and unable to look away.
  47. Reflection
    It would be a bracing, haunting work even if it weren’t so timely.
  48. The Asphalt Jungle
    Mr. Huston has filmed a straight crime story about as cleverly and graphically as it could be filmed.
  49. Hero
    Filled with meticulous set pieces, including a showdown between Snow and Moon set among swirls of golden-yellow leaves, Hero is easy on the eyes, but it's too segmented to gather much momentum and too art-directed to convey much urgency.
  50. Alcarràs
    The film’s striking images — a girl’s made-up face, sullen amid a crowd of colorful revelers; solar panels gleaming sinisterly below a full moon — leave an indelible trail.
  51. Shane
    Shane contains something more than beauty and the grandeur of the mountains and plains, drenched by the brilliant Western sunshine and the violent, torrential, black-browed rains. It contains a tremendous comprehension of the bitterness and passion of the feuds that existed between the new homesteaders and the cattlemen on the open range.
  52. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    The filmmaker’s poetic logic is inextricable from his consciousness of race and community, and of his function and potential as an artist grappling with his own circumstances and those of the people he’s depicting. “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” is not a long film, but it contains whole worlds.
  53. Simple as Water
    Simple as Water is anything but simple when it comes to its technical achievements, weaving together familiar immigrant narratives in ways that still manage to surprise and stun.
  54. The Taste of Things
    In a phenomenological way, The Taste of Things captures the joy of variety injected into mere existence: savory and sweet, hot and sour, juice and cream and astringency are not required for pure subsistence, but the rich range of taste we have created in our daily meals says something about human longings not easily put into words.
  55. 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.
  56. Neil Young: Heart of Gold
    At one point, during one of his occasional verbal rambles, he (Young) says half-jokingly, half-defensively that he's got some love songs left in him. This film, which is at once a valentine from one artist to another and a valentine from a musician to his audience, is surely proof that he does.
  57. In Front of Your Face
    The secret is poised somewhere between triteness and disarming simplicity.
  58. Mudbound
    It’s a work of historical imagination that lands in the present with disquieting, illuminating force.
  59. Passing
    Together with Thompson and Negga, Hall hauntingly brings to life characters forced to exist in that “not entirely friendly” space, with its cruelties, appearances, ambiguities and hard, merciless truths.
  60. My Life as a Zucchini
    Mr. Barras’s film, with its bigheaded, asymmetrical modeling-clay figures and off-kilter picture-book backdrops, explores a harsh situation with gentle whimsy.
  61. In the Same Breath
    If In the Same Breath — the title becomes more resonant with each new scene and shock — were simply about China and its handling (mishandling) of the pandemic, it would be exemplary. But the story that she tells is larger and deeper than any one country because this is a story that envelops all of us, and it is devastating.
  62. Atlantis
    Vasyanovych and his actors manage to make this parable both heartening and stupefying.
  63. Honeyland
    The opening minutes of Honeyland are as astonishing — as sublime and strange and full of human and natural beauty — as anything I’ve ever seen in a movie.
  64. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
    Clever, funny, wildly innovative film.
  65. 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.
  66. Holy Motors
    It's a gift for moviegoers to have this much freedom, and exhilarating. In Holy Motors you never know where Mr. Carax will take you and you never know what, exactly, you're to do once you're there.
  67. God's Own Country
    God’s Own Country weaves a rough magic from Joshua James Richards’s biting cinematography and the story’s slow, unsteady arc from bitter to hopeful.
  68. Kaili Blues
    As lovely as the movie is to look at (and the final scene is exceptionally wonderful), it’s too oblique to concentrate its energies and sharpen its focus.
  69. Unforgiven
    Unforgiven... never quite fulfills the expectations it so carefully sets up. It doesn't exactly deny them, but the bloody confrontations that end the film appear to be purposely muted, more effective theoretically than dramatically.
  70. The Intruder
    The best way to enjoy The Intruder is to surrender to its poetry without demanding cut-and-dried explanations.
  71. Forbidden Lie$
    Cool-headed, lighthearted and outrageously entertaining.
  72. The Wages of Fear (1953)
    The excitement derives entirely from the awareness of nitroglycerine and the gingerly, breathless handling of it. You sit there waiting for the theatre to explode.
  73. The Dark Knight
    Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, it goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind.
  74. Everybody Wants Some!!
    Everybody Wants Some!! is more than just nostalgic. It’s downright utopian, a hormonal pastoral endowed with the innocent charm of a children’s book. There are plenty of movies about lust-addled youth, but it’s unusual to find one that feels truly wholesome.
  75. Two Prosecutors
    Mordantly comedic, Two Prosecutors is deliberately paced but makes a tightly conceived addition to Loznitsa’s work, which rides deep into the long, dark nights of Russian history with fiction, observational documentary and immersions in the Soviet archives.
  76. Behemoth
    Behemoth proceeds placidly, making it easy to become lulled. Its haunting power grows in retrospect — as if you’ve returned from a journey and can’t believe what you’ve seen.
  77. The Past
    The story is nearly obscured by its schematic design (everyone doesn’t just have his or her reasons; he or she is also guilty), but there are mysteries, surprises and complexities, notably in the representation of the children and in Ms. Bejo’s thorny, layered performance with its strata of neediness, resentment and hope.
  78. Pillion
    With immense sensitivity, the screenwriter and director Harry Lighton, making his feature debut, stages sequences that deepen the characters and expand our understanding of their lives.
  79. Black Bag
    By the time Pierce Brosnan shows up, you may find yourself giggling at the whole meta deliciousness of this enterprise. You may also find yourself feverishly hoping that when it comes time to revive the Bond series, someone has the brains to call Koepp and Soderbergh.
  80. Cinderella
    Whoever engineered the sequence of the pumpkin transformation in this film—the magical change to coach and horses—deserves an approving hand. And the scene in which Cinderella blows soap bubbles—opalescent globes full of fragile reflections and rainbow colors—is one of the cleverest animations yet seen. To the fellows who dreamed up these fancies we are heartily grateful, indeed. They have sprinkled into Cinderella—along with sugar and wit—some vagrant art.
  81. One Child Nation
    Soul-baring and furious, the documentary One Child Nation takes a powerful, unflinching look at China’s present through its past.
  82. 24 Hour Party People
    "Print the legend," Mr. Wilson says at one point, both quoting John Ford and laying the foundation for his own often fact-free fabulous fabulism. And this movie is just that -- fabulous.
  83. Vengeance Is Mine
    VENGEANCE IS MINE, directed by Shohei Imamura, a Japanese director largely unknown in this country, is chilly without being austere, the sort of confounding movie that tells us too much and not enough.
  84. The Three Caballeros
    A fantastic film...There is no question that Mr. Disney has got here a brilliant, fluid style for presenting musical pictures and that his enthusiasm expressed throughout is great. But he has't quite brought them into order. His film is flashy and exciting - and no more.
  85. Summer Solstice
    A triumph of sensitivity.
  86. The Search
    The Search is not only an absorbing and gratifying emotional drama of the highest sort, being a vivid and convincing representation of how one of the "lost children" of Europe is found, but it gives a graphic, overwhelming comprehension of the frightful cruelty to innocent children that has been done abroad.
  87. Identifying Features
    It’s a confident debut feature, and a sophisticated acknowledgment of the powerlessness that migrants face.
  88. The Sacrifice
    It may not be your glass of tea; it's a tall glass, through which events are seen murkily. Those who stay with it, however, may find rewards in burst after burst of beauty and even a glimmer of meaning.
  89. Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
    To elaborate as Chatwin did, Herzog implies, is a legitimate response to places that can’t help but exert a strong pull on the imagination. And of course, the truth-and-a-half principle figures heavily in Herzog’s own art — of which this film is a particularly outstanding example.
  90. Atonement
    Atonement fails to be anything more than a decorous, heavily decorated and ultimately superficial reading of the book on which it is based.
  91. The Tree of Life
    With disarming sincerity and daunting formal sophistication The Tree of Life ponders some of the hardest and most persistent questions, the kind that leave adults speechless when children ask them.
  92. Decision to Leave
    From the very first destabilizing moments of this movie, Park dazzles you with the beauty of his images and the intoxicating bravura of his unfettered imagination. And then, just when you think you have found your bearings, he unmoors you yet once more, blowing minds and shattering hearts, yours included.
  93. Alexandra
    A film of startling originality and beauty -- feels like a communiqué from another time, another place, anywhere but here.
  94. Daughters
    There are a lot of tears in this documentary, for the subjects and the audience, too. But Daughters is a remarkable study in how to tell this kind of story without twisting into sentimentality.
  95. The Fabelmans
    The Fabelmans is, as the title says, somewhat of a fable and wonderful in both large and small ways, even if Spielberg can’t help but soften the rougher, potentially lacerating edges. It’s what he does; it’s also what the audience expects of him, and he’s nothing if not obliging.
  96. Naked
    Naked is as corrosive and sometimes as funny as anything Mr. Leigh has done to date. It's loaded with wild flights of absurd rhetoric and encounters with characters so eccentric that they seem to have come directly from life. Nobody would dare imagine them.
  97. Fire Music
    This concise but cogent documentary directed by Tom Surgal is crammed with exhilarating sounds, moving reminiscences and stimulating arguments that it is not just music, but vital music.
  98. 'Round Midnight
    The screenplay, by Mr. Tavernier and David Rayfiel, is both rich and relaxed, with a style that perfectly matches the musicians'. Some of the talk may well be improvised, but nothing sounds improvised, but nothing sounds forced, and the film remains effortlessly idiosyncratic all the way through.
  99. The Host
    The Host is a cautionary environmental tale about the domination of nature and the costs of human folly, and it may send chills up your spine. But only one will tickle your fancy and make you cry encore, not just uncle.
  100. All Is Forgiven (2007)
    The atmosphere the director creates, once fully breathed in, has an emotional gravity that becomes devastating as it settles.
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