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. The Story of Luke
    When it works, the film serves as a modest reminder that the challenges of autism may sometimes be no more daunting or fearsome than those that face anyone in search of an independent life.
  2. Simon Killer
    Though the film’s ice-cold blend of the cerebral and the atavistic can be off-putting, it enables a queasy portrait of moral disengagement that lingers long after Simon has slipped from the screen.
  3. Disneynature: Wings of Life
    Wings of Life is almost so lovely that you suspect it’s as computer-generated as “Life of Pi.” But it’s reality captured, through time-lapse and high-speed techniques: if not the most exciting moviegoing, it’s praiseworthy.
  4. Bert Stern: Original Madman
    An unappealing jumble of sex, regret and hero worship, “Bert Stern” is an odd tribute to brilliance muffled by lust.
  5. Free Angela & All Political Prisoners
    Shola Lynch’s documentary about Angela Davis, the activist and beacon of counterculture radicalism, is a snappily edited, archivally wallpapered recollection of fearless behavior in the face of an antsy establishment. But it’s equally significant as a pointed act of retelling.
  6. Smyrna: The Destruction of a Cosmopolitan City - 1900-1922
    A sobering study in how individual human beings can become afterthoughts in the face of broad movements like nationalism, a phenomenon that is still much in evidence almost a century later.
  7. Down the Shore
    The director, Harold Guskin, and writer, Sandra Jennings, show admirable patience in letting the story unspool, and the actors reward them.
  8. No Place on Earth
    The bare facts of the feat seize the imagination, even if Ms. Tobias’s competent documentary doesn’t quite rise to the challenge.
  9. 6 Souls
    The filmmakers’ aversion to coherent narrative and genuinely suspenseful visuals (not to mention a penchant for having Ms. Moore receive terrible news via cellphone) keep the movie’s mystery stew from hitting the spot.
  10. Stranger Things
    Something unexpectedly profound emerges from the flimsiest of stories in Stranger Things, a drama so modest and trusting of its two leads that any directing flourishes might have shattered its spell.
  11. Lotus Eaters
    What Lotus Eaters can take pride in are Gareth Munden’s stunning black-and-white cinematography and Ms. Campbell-Hughes, a riveting visual subject suggesting miles of internal depth. She makes this wallow in callow company watchable.
  12. Evil Dead
    Doesn’t have the original’s wooden performances, puffy clothes and hairdos or its amusingly crude special effects, but it does share its blood lust.
  13. The Company You Keep
    This earnest, well-intentioned movie elicits frustration that its story had to be packaged as a conventional, not very suspenseful fugitive thriller with a bogus Hollywood ending.
  14. Trance
    For all Mr. Boyle’s labors Trance principally comes off as a showcase for his brio, a spirit that animates all his choices, visual and otherwise.
  15. Upstream Color
    With its fragmentation and mysteries, Upstream Color offers itself up as a puzzle as well as a philosophical toy that you can spin and spin until the cafe closes and kicks you into the night.
  16. Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner
    An indelible, gripping documentary portrait.
  17. Himmatwala
    Himmatwala feels timid and overeager. Except when it’s terrible.
  18. Tyler Perry's Temptation
    Limp pacing and countless shots of Washington’s skyline plague the narrative. Ms. Smollett-Bell exudes an earthy appeal, but it’s the charismatic Mr. Jones who steals the picture. Given all the stifling preachiness, that’s to be expected.
  19. The Revolutionary Optimists
    As heartening as it is to see a slum child tutored about vicious cycles of adversity and using the buzzword “partnership” with aplomb, the film comes to feel cut and dried.
  20. Detour
    At times the groan and scream of collapsing metal sounds so authentic you might mistake Jackson’s heavy breathing for your own.
  21. Rescue in the Philippines
    Ultimately, this compelling story will leave viewers wanting even more information about this mission and the daily lives of the émigrés in Manila.
  22. Somebody Up There Likes Me
    It’s all kind of cute. Maybe a little too cute, but it does have a nice circle-of-life ending. And along the way, Mr. Byington shows a knack for observational humor, slipping in sly jokes that force you to keep paying attention despite the slim plot. Droll and interesting; just not very substantial.
  23. Dog Pound
    Kim Chapiron, proves an excellent choreographer of brutality...But without a strong political point (unlike its source material), Dog Pound feels hollow and hopeless.
  24. Violeta Went to Heaven
    Mr. Wood has created a poignant portrait of an artist unable to escape the stamp of her class or the burdens of aging.
  25. Code of the West
    This film from Rebecca Richman Cohen is a mostly dutiful documentary that drifts dangerously close to earnestness.
  26. G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    The film’s director, Jon M. Chu, executes a pretty good high-altitude fight scene. Still, there should be a “Fans Only” sign at the door of every theater.
  27. Family Weekend
    This belabored comedy, directed by Benjamin Epps, has a slick visual veneer and some capable performances, especially by Ms. Rulin and Ms. King. But the script, by Matt K. Turner, is loaded with contradictions, its hollow flirtation with subversion amount to airplane pablum.
  28. Wrong
    Wrong lets most of its random gags and view-askew premises twist in the wind like hamhandedly wacky improv comedy, punctuated with synthesizer effects. The film’s misguided flatness is perhaps its fatal flaw, not so much deadpan or existential as just monotonous.
  29. Mental
    Mental wildly overplays the kookiness and quirk.
  30. The Host
    Dopey, derivative and dull, The Host is a brazen combination of unoriginal science-fiction themes, young-adult pandering and bottom-line calculation. That sounds like it should work (really!), but it never does, largely because the story is as drained of energy as are its moony aliens.
  31. The Place Beyond the Pines
    The three-part story, spread over nearly two and a half hours, represents a triumph of sympathetic imagination and a failure of narrative economy. But if, in the end, the film can’t quite sustain its epic vision, it does, along the way, achieve the density and momentum of a good novel.
  32. Renoir
    The movie, like its subject, refuses to stir up unnecessary melodrama. There are many small conflicts and psychological undercurrents, but the closest thing to a narrative theme is the effect Andrée has on the Renoir household.
  33. Blancanieves
    It communicates the delights of pastiche rather than the thrill of original creation, a secondhand movie love that is seductive but not entirely satisfying.
  34. Room 237
    Like “The Shining” and its maze within a maze, Mr. Ascher’s movie is something of a labyrinth. Puzzling your way through its compilation of vaguely lucid and crackpot ideas is pleasurable though, for avid movie lovers, it may also feel like a warning.
  35. Welcome to the Punch
    There are good movies and plenty more bad ones and many, many more that fall somewhere in between. And then there are enjoyable absurdities like Welcome to the Punch, which contain evaluative multitudes and which, scene by scene, register as not bad, pretty good and flat-out ridiculous.
  36. InAPPropriate Comedy
    Sometimes a movie is so awful that the word awful is not up to the task of conveying its awfulness. The awful InAPPropriate Comedy is such a movie. It is memorably awful. It is stunningly awful. It is so awful that we are fortunate that “awful” has an adverbial use that means “very” or “extremely.” This movie is awfully awful.
  37. Murph: The Protector
    Murph: The Protector reminds us of the valor expended on distant front lines and the holes left at home.
  38. Everybody Has a Plan
    Mr. Mortensen keeps you watching, even when the movie’s storytelling underwhelms. But Everybody Has a Plan is less about story than about texture and atmosphere. They stay with you, as does the haunted visage of Agustín, drifting on the delta waters.
  39. Come Out and Play
    Stripped down and edited for disequilibrium rather than clarity, “Play” is less interested in pandering to gorehounds than in highlighting our reluctance to view children as anything other than innocent.
  40. Love and Honor
    The film dresses up pretty young things in fatigues and retro T-shirts for a story so clichéd and brainless that it’s almost more disturbing than laughable.
  41. New World
    New World is both less bloody and more thoughtful than most of its genre, the shifting-alliances plot becoming more engrossing as it progresses.
  42. Silver Circle
    It also offers cold, sterile, cheap-looking computer animation vastly inferior to that of most video games. Ron Paul acolytes, help yourself. Everyone else, stay away.
  43. You Don't Need Feet to Dance
    A film plunked somewhat unfortunately between the inspirational and the ordinary.
  44. Dorfman in Love
    The sentiments are heartfelt, but the execution is common.
  45. My Brother the Devil
    Nuances of faith, politics and sexual identity enrich what initially presents as a classic good son-bad son tale.
  46. Leonie
    Leonie Gilmour was almost certainly unusual and unusually self-reliant. Too bad that the film that bears her name ultimately reduces her to the mother of her child.
  47. The Sapphires
    The raggedness of The Sapphires can’t be separated from its exuberant charm. Like the Sapphires themselves, the film is determined to muscle its way into your heart, which would have to be a lump of gristle to resist it.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hunky Dory
    Pop memories are short. If the world conjured by Hunky Dory is sweetly appealing, it has all the pertinence of a dream half-remembered from long ago.
  49. Starbuck
    Starbuck is up to its eyeballs in mush.
  50. The Croods
    The movie is at its most interesting and amusing when riffing on how cavemen might have reacted to new experiences and ideas, like fire and shoes. Whether the kiddies will appreciate that is unclear, but they’ll certainly like the voice work done by Emma Stone as Eep.
  51. Olympus Has Fallen
    It may be too much to ask for anything more, but, on the other hand, if you’re going to go to the trouble of pretending to blow up the White House, you might also want to pretend that something was at stake.
  52. Gimme the Loot
    Gimme the Loot has a lot to say about the contradictions of a place that is defined by both abundant opportunity and ferocious inequality. But the film makes its points in a lighthearted, street-smart vernacular, treating its protagonists not as embodiments of a social condition but rather as self-aware individuals who are, like teenagers everywhere, both smart and dumb.
  53. Admission
    Mr. Weitz lines up a target placed at the explosive intersection of class, race, region and every other source of societal anguish, and then does not so much miss as aim in another direction — or several — letting fly a volley of darts that land as lightly as badminton birdies.
  54. Eden
    Enough films about human trafficking have been made in recent years that the outlines of Eden should be painfully familiar. But that familiarity doesn’t cushion this movie’s excruciating vision.
  55. Le Pont du Nord
    It's another example of the ever-widening gap between the real world and the fantasies of a kind of artistic temperament more concerned with random self expression than with the expression of coherent feelings or ideas about love, alienation, outrage, politics or even of movie-making. It shrivels the imagination instead of enriching it. [7 Oct. 1981]
  56. 108 (Cuchillo de Palo)
    Patiently photographed by Carlos Vásquez, who bestows the same gentle attention on grainy snapshots and the beautifully ruined face of an aging drag queen, 108 peels back layers of delusion and dishonesty.
  57. Stars in Shorts
    Its most consistent pleasures derive more from its performances than from storytelling.
  58. Mindless Behavior: All Around the World
    Watching the quasi-documentary marketing tool Mindless Behavior: All Around the World, you would think that the boy band Mindless Behavior existed as a charity, so abundant are the platitudes about the members’ living for the fans, being positive, inspiring others and the self-actualization of the “mindless” state.
  59. Clip
    Cheerless and voyeuristic, Clip (which was banned in Russia) seems a sincere attempt to portray a lost and disaffected generation. But the film’s brutally honest parade of callous behavior and casual, almost cruel sex has a depressing prurience that wears you down.
  60. Better Mus' Come
    Despite its cultural detail and fetching leads this Jamaican director’s colorful debut feature is undone by ragged scene construction, weak acting and a scattered script.
  61. Reincarnated
    Snoop has certainly tempered his worldview, but enlightenment isn’t as evident here as much as a woozy weariness, perhaps a long-term byproduct of being very, very stoned.
  62. My Amityville Horror
    These days, when paranormal-themed shows are all over television, Mr. Lutz sounds like just another guy peddling an unverifiable spooky story.
  63. Mariachi Gringo
    As the moving concluding scenes cement, Mariachi Gringo is right on pitch — and, happily, not simply as you’d expect.
  64. The Kill Hole
    The film grasps for credibility with scenes of a support group (featuring some real veterans) and cryptic voice-overs that strive for profundity but achieve only pretentiousness.
  65. K-11
    To borrow RuPaul’s delightful catchphrase, the only possible response to a project like this is to advise it to “sashay away.”
  66. Crazy and Thief
    It’s a far cry from the wonders of Morris Engel’s “Little Fugitive” and might have been better off in a kid’s-size portion as a short.
  67. Vanishing Waves
    This Lithuanian love story from Kristina Buozyte offers a discomfiting blend of visual ecstasy and narrative sterility.
  68. Upside Down
    Did I mention that Upside Down is simply awful?
  69. Reality
    Reality is a story about one man’s desire to make it big on the small screen, and something of a familiar exploration of the blurring between reality and its simulations. More elliptically and more interestingly, it is also a look at an Italy engrossed with rituals and spectacle, in watching and being watched.
  70. If I Were You
    A comedy that is so scatterbrained and long-winded that much of it feels invented on the spot. (It’s also a half-hour too long.)
  71. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    Because Mr. Carell doesn’t go in for the kind of all-out caricature that Mr. Ferrell embraces with a manic glee, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has an underlying soulfulness that cuts against its farcical aspirations. This is not to say that Mr. Carell isn’t just fine, only that his performance, as impressive as it is, lacks a shark’s bite.
  72. Ginger & Rosa
    Ms. Fanning, who is younger than her character, shows a nearly Streepian mixture of poise, intensity and technical precision. It is frightening how good she is and hard to imagine anything she could not do.
  73. The Call
    An effectively creepy thriller about a 911 operator and a young miss in peril, The Call is a model of low-budget filmmaking.
  74. From Up on Poppy Hill
    This movie...is a lovely example of the strong realist tendency in Japanese animation. Its visual magic lies in painterly compositions of foliage, clouds, architecture and water, and its emotional impact comes from the way everyday life is washed in the colors of memory.
  75. Spring Breakers
    In Spring Breakers [Mr. Korine] bores into a contested, deeply American topic — the pursuit of happiness taken to nihilistic extremes — but turns his exploration into such a gonzo, outrageously funny party that it takes a while to appreciate that this is more of a horror film than a comedy.
  76. I Killed My Mother
    As a director, Mr. Dolan has a freewheeling style, and he’s self-dramatizing enough to want to call attention to it without being too much of a visual show-off.
  77. Philip Roth: Unmasked
    Fittingly enough, given that his great subject has always been himself, it is Mr. Roth who dominates the screen...He is, for 90 minutes, marvelous company — expansive, funny, generous and candid.
  78. The Bitter Buddha
    The film’s unvarying lack of drama or direction can be wearing, but the schlubby originality of its subject fully repays the longueurs.
  79. The Other Side of the Ice
    This tedious chronicle has the interest level of a home movie of a vacation with bickering and yammering left intact.
  80. Downeast
    This is not an easy documentary to watch, in the sense that the filmmakers let the story tell itself, without narration or expert commentary. That ultimately makes it all the more touching.
  81. Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey
    This one-note documentary from Ramona S. Diaz is as hostile to conflict as the group’s songs themselves.
  82. Girl Rising
    Though some of the writers inject a force of metaphor and strength of voice, no one would confuse the movie with a short-story collection. But it’s more ambitious and effective at blunting cynicism than most consciousness-raising efforts.
  83. The ABCs of Death
    At its best when merging shocks with social commentary, this halting compilation improves significantly as it nears the end of the alphabet.
  84. Language of a Broken Heart
    Although Language of a Broken Heart, a romantic comedy written by and starring Juddy Talt, eventually drowns in clichés and predictability, it has a few decent moments of humor and some appealing performances that make it marginally better than most vanity projects.
  85. Greedy Lying Bastards
    Collated for momentum, the film’s many interviews, wide-ranging archival footage and montage of modern ecological disasters form a blunt but carefully positioned instrument. And despite a bit of Michael Moore-style nonsense at the end the tightly edited narrative displays a reach (nine countries) and clarity of composition that hold the attention.
  86. The Silence
    [Mr. Odar] allows the story to unfold at a deliberate pace, emphasizing the psychological nuances of the mystery rather than its procedural details, and using graceful wide-screen compositions and haunting sound design to create a compelling mood of menace, anxiety and sorrow.
  87. Electrick Children
    Electrick Children is well acted and refreshingly nonjudgmental, but its narrative continuity is tenuous at best. As it jounces along toward a pat, unsatisfying ending, it leaves essential questions unanswered. But the movie’s underlying sweetness leaves a residual glow.
  88. The Monk
    Mr. Moll, whose films include “With a Friend Like Harry...,” somewhat heroically manages to keep the story’s manifold twists from becoming knotted, but he’s less adept at setting up the characters and their relationships and especially the depth and significance of their faith.
  89. Emperor
    Mr. Jones’s performance is the only spark within this otherwise dull, well-mannered exercise.
  90. Dead Man Down
    Dead Man Down, unfortunately, turns out to be too innocuous to qualify as either actually good or delectably bad.
  91. Beyond the Hills
    Even as Mr. Mungiu maintains a detached, objective point of view, allowing the details of the story to speak for themselves, he also allows you to glimpse the complex and volatile inner lives of his characters.
  92. Oz the Great and Powerful
    Can the major studios still make magic? From the looks of Oz the Great and Powerful, a dispiriting, infuriating jumble of big money, small ideas and ugly visuals, the answer seems to be no — unless, perhaps, the man behind the curtain is Martin Scorsese or James Cameron.
  93. The We and the I
    To call this thrillingly original, deeply felt movie a coming-of-age story would be to insult it with cliché. It’s much more the story, or rather a series of interlocking, incomplete stories, about what it feels like to be a certain age and to feel caught, as the title suggests, between the desire to be yourself and the longing to fit in.
  94. Gut Renovation
    An alternate title for Gut Renovation, Su Friedrich’s cranky, sarcastic documentary polemic about the gentrification of a Brooklyn neighborhood, might be “The Rape of Williamsburg.”
  95. Day of the Falcon
    A far, far cry from “Lawrence of Arabia,” but it has its diversions.
  96. I, Me aur Main
    The most interesting thing to watch in I, Me aur Main, the directorial debut of Kapil Sharma (his father, Rakesh Sharma, was the first Indian in space), is the changing moral landscape.
  97. The Last Exorcism Part II
    At least this movie, like its predecessor, has Ashley Bell as Nell. An actress who suggests religious piety, carnal fire and satanic aggression with equal dexterity, Ms. Bell provides a pulse an audience can connect with amid the standard-issue atmospheric accouterments.
  98. 21 and Over
    The movie’s humor — at the expense of Asians, Latinas and even Serbs — comes off just as tone deaf and random as Seth MacFarlane’s Oscar-night shenanigans.
  99. Genius on Hold
    This promisingly tragic tale is sunk by cartloads of context and an overbearing, slanted narration.
  100. The Sweeney
    Simon Dennis’s photography is glossy and crisp, and a lengthy foot chase — making excellent use of the National Gallery — is inventively choreographed. And if the villains are little more than fireplugs in balaclavas, the violence they provoke is satisfyingly vicious.
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