The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Land
    Wright’s movie is ambitious (that location! that weather!), but not grandiose. Its storytelling economy helps make it credible and eventually moving.
  2. Stuck
    Stuck, while not strictly a horror film, is steeped in gore and carries a seam of mocking gallows humor as relentless as that of "Sweeney Todd."
  3. Nina's Tragedies
    The biggest weakness in Nina's Tragedies, is the character of Nadav. His shadowy presence leaves the movie without a solid center around which to spin its tales.
  4. Sunshine Cleaning
    All in all, it's a mess, and much as Ms. Blunt pouts, Ms. Adams twinkles, and Mr. Arkin growls, there's nothing they can do to clean it up.
  5. Private
    An emotionally and politically loaded allegory.
  6. Wondrous Oblivion
    Form and content fight to the death in Wondrous Oblivion, Paul Morrison's defiantly gauzy tale of racial friction in 1960s England.
  7. Word Wars
    The film demands patience with grainy photography, garage-band power chords and eye-straining alphabetic jumbles. It's neither easy viewing nor easy living: the game has worn these men down to a childlike state, which makes them ultimately compelling.
  8. The Polar Express
    A grave and disappointing failure, as much of imagination as of technology.
  9. La Cage aux Folles
    La Cage aux Folles is naughty in the way of comedies that pretend to be sophisticated but actually serve to reinforce the most popular conventions and most witless stereotypes.
  10. Edmond
    Mr. Macy, a master at playing sticks of human dynamite in mild-mannered camouflage, gives the nerviest screen performance of his career.
  11. Two Lovers and a Bear
    The beauty and absurdity (things also get harrowing) don’t entirely compensate for the overheated romanticism in which the movie is grounded, but they do make Two Lovers and a Bear a nearly singular cinematic trek.
  12. The Natural
    Mr. Levinson, who both wrote and directed Diner, the small, exquisitely realized comedy about growing up aimless in Baltimore, here seems to be at the service of other people's decisions. Though entertaining in short stretches, The Natural has no recognizable character of its own.
  13. Eyewitness
    A thoroughly delightful but far from plausible mystery melodrama that operates exclusively on high spirits and a no-nonsense intelligence that is never sidetracked by coherence.
  14. The Incomparable Rose Hartman
    Pushy, judgmental, tart-tongued and self-obsessed, the photographer at the heart of Otis Mass’s penetrating documentary, The Incomparable Rose Hartman, is, like her snapshots, a piece of work.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Eiger Sanction
    The Eiger Sanction is a long, foolish but never boring suspense melodrama about a college art professor named Jonathan Hemlock (Clint Eastwood), who has a passion for French Impressionists and mountain climbing and an underground reputation as the best assassin in the international spy business.
  16. The Wackness
    The movie he (Josh Peck) is in, The Wackness, written and directed by Jonathan Levine, makes a good-faith effort to steer clear of such clichés, and succeeds and fails in roughly equal measure.
    • The New York Times
  17. Horse Girl
    Horse Girl delves into a troubled mind only to get lost among its oddities, forgetting the sensitivity that drew it there in the first place.
  18. The Kentucky Fried Movie
    Lots of people will probably like The Kentucky Fried Movie, just as they like Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's hamburgers. But popularity is still no reason for deifying mediocrity.
  19. The People vs. Fritz Bauer
    Mr. Kraume captures the glances and motions that lay bare a character’s thoughts. He’s fond of the gruff and curmudgeonly Bauer, yet sentimentality is scarce while the double-crossings are surprising and the dry humor is welcome.
  20. Enemy
    Much of the fun in Enemy, which is tightly constructed and expertly shot, lies in Mr. Gyllenhaal’s playful and subtle performances.
  21. The Manhattan Project
    Mr. Brickman, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay (with Thomas Baum), has a real gift for eccentric comedy and characters. The Manhattan Project, with its vaguely populist leanings, isn't crazy enough. Mr. Brickman fails to make big issues comprehensible. He just makes them small.
  22. The True Adventures of Wolfboy
    No one could accuse these adventures of being conventional.
  23. Americana
    Compared with “Eddington,” this summer’s other tongue-in-cheek neo-western, the movie, ostensibly set in South Dakota, is less aggressive in its efforts to appear topical; it may not even have much on its mind beyond clever plot construction. But watching its pieces snap into place is more fun.
  24. Drawing Restraint 9
    The uninitiated viewer can admire it simply for the majesty of its visual poetry.
  25. The Hater
    The movie is most effective in detailing how disinformation campaigns work.
  26. The Hero
    This film belongs to its star.
  27. Sólo con tu pareja
    Mr. Cuarón never quite finds the tone that would allow him to fuse belly laughs with the horror of illness and death, but then perhaps Pedro Almodóvar is the only filmmaker able to mix darkness and light in that way. Still it is hard not to admire the younger man's cheeky self-confidence, and hard not to enjoy the dexterity of his camera movements and the flair with which he attempts both low comedy and high melodrama.
  28. Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!
    The movie is at its most engaging when examining the near-monopolies controlling chicken farmers in the United States.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Vanishing Point
    A movie about which I can think of almost nothing good to say.
  30. Night and the City
    As directed by Irwin Winkler, Night and the City is colorfully acted and refreshingly free of all the moody cliches such a story might be expected to thrive on. But it is also saddled with overly busy direction that sometimes interferes with the dialogue, making Mr. Price's long, perversely elegant conversational riffs hard to hear.
  31. Unpregnant
    Its driving force may seem topical, but the story’s heart is timeless: the harmony between longtime friends, and Veronica and Bailey throw themselves into even the most fraught situations with giddy enthusiasm.
  32. The Isle
    A movie of extremes, and that goes for its aesthetics. As gory as the scenes of torture and self-mutilation may be, they are pitted against shimmering cinematography that lends the setting the ethereal beauty of an Asian landscape painting.
  33. This One's for the Ladies
    The movie’s determination to make stripping mundane has a way of infecting the film. Even the dancing sequences, often shot in poor lighting as if on a smartphone camera, look perfunctory.
  34. Iluminados por el fuego
    Blessed by Fire, a bitter remembrance of the Falklands War in 1982, captures battlefield chaos and confusion with a visceral force you won't forget.
  35. Conviction
    It would be easy to dismiss Conviction on the ground that it plays like a made-for-television movie, but the truth is that, as often as not, movies made for the small screen are better than this: braver, darker, more willing to explore odd corners of feeling.
  36. Madrid, 1987
    Sweet, sometimes dull and certainly overlong.
  37. Hammett
    Hammett, the first major American movie by Wim Wenders, isn't quite the mess one might expect, considering the length of time it's been in production and the number of people who seem to have contributed to it. It's not ever boring, but heaven only knows what it's supposed to be about or why it was made. One answer would serve both questions.
  38. Petite Solange
    As Solange’s teenage woes bubble up and then cool to a simmer, Ropert reveals a knack for calibrating emotion. It can be agony to accept one’s parents as people with needs and faults all their own, and Ropert observes Solange’s coming-of-age lucidly and without judgment.
  39. Slap Shot
    The performances—which have a lot to do with the right casting, particularly in the smaller roles—are impeccable. Paul Newman maintains an easy balance between star and character-actor. The leading-man authority is there, but it's given comic perspective by the intensity of the character and by its tackiness, evident even in the clothes he wears.
  40. The Idolmaker
    The Idolmaker is a modest, interesting, well-acted movie, more lively than it is exciting.
  41. Song Sung Blue
    The couple’s earnestness sounds mockable, but it’s not: They are too sincere, too joyful and too grateful to be doing the only thing that either of them ever wanted to do. And right now all I want to do is dust off my vinyl copy of “Hot August Night.”
  42. Dreams
    Dreams might feel distant and frosty, but it has a lot to say about inequality and the prerogatives of privilege.
  43. Before You Know It
    There are a good number of funny and pointed individual scenes and bit parts here (Alec Baldwin is droll as an inept therapist).
  44. The Kids Grow Up
    You are not Doug Block, of course. Except to the extent - measured by the depth of your absorption in this remarkable film - that you are.
  45. Brick Lane
    Certainly touching, even heart-rending at times, and it mostly steers clear of the didacticism and sentimentality its subject matter often invites. But it never takes the full measure of its modest heroine, and makes her world a bit too small.
  46. Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band
    You can’t beat the access or the clips, although the absence of Hudson (whom Roher apparently filmed) from the present-day interviews is peculiar. His voice might have provided a valuable counterpoint to Robertson’s recollections.
  47. 10 Years
    An unpretentious, well-acted ensemble piece that doesn't aspire to be a portentous generational time capsule like "The Big Chill," "American Graffiti" or "Diner." But it has enough markers - a grown-up, married white rapper who break dances; a karaoke bar - to suggest an approximate date.
  48. Avatar: Fire and Ash
    The fight sequences are models of spatial coherency and escalating tension, and they grab you wholly, turning a movie into a full-body workout. That feeling dissipates whenever the fighting stops, the story cranks back up and somebody calls someone else “bro,” which happens too often.
  49. Mail Order Wife
    The narrative manages 30 solid minutes of ingenuity, before breaking into a version of Charlie Kaufman-style absurdity.
  50. Willard
    The worst flaw of Willard is a clunky tone-deaf screenplay based on Gilbert Ralston's original and updated by the director. Barely a line flies by that doesn't land with a wooden thud.
  51. The Faculty
    This mediocre sci-fi horror film about an Ohio high school being taken over by thirsty space aliens intent on world domination breaks no new ground. But it has an engaging cast.
  52. The Count of Monte Cristo
    The film's resolute indifference to fashion makes it, perhaps paradoxically, a refreshing piece of old-style entertainment, accompanied by a whooshing, trembling score by Edward Shearmur.
  53. At War
    To this viewer, it is a spectacular whiff.
  54. The Universal Theory
    Though visually handsome, the film leaves the audience with the sense that, like a grad student, it is still working out its big ideas.
  55. Oleanna
    Mr. Mamet can be a first-rate film maker, and in works like House of Games and Homicide he trusts language as much as he relies on small, subtle camera movements. Here both the language and Mr. Mamet's film making let him down.
  56. Broken Arrow
    Mr. Woo orchestrates his giddy, daring stunts on a newly spectacular level. There's plenty of physical audacity on screen.
  57. The Informer
    The movie has a surfeit of the sudden reversals and interlocking loyalties that can make for an absorbing time killer.
  58. Reign Over Me
    Reign Over Me uses the rhythms and moods of comedy to explore, and also to contain, overpowering feelings of loss, anger and hurt. And like that earlier movie ("The Upside of Anger"), this one is maddeningly uneven.
  59. Triple Frontier
    Chandor handles the action scenes smoothly, making it easy to gloss over what the movie is saying, trying to say or accidentally saying. He maintains the kind of accelerated pace that gives your eyes a workout, and pads the story with an inviting camaraderie that brings you into the group.
  60. Somewhere in Queens
    Here, Romano sticks to the outer-borough Italian American milieu of his series. The results are mixed.
  61. The Man with Two Brains
    This is Mr. Martin's movie, and he brings to it the ingeniously dopey presence that's become his trademark; he easily carries even the most dubious moments in the rather jumbled screenplay, which was written by Mr. Martin, Mr. Reiner and George Gipe. [03 Jun 1983]
    • The New York Times
  62. The Jeffrey Dahmer Files
    If the film’s spare re-enactments are a little awkward, they also smartly repurpose Dahmer’s studied reserve into a meditation on perversion as hypnotic as it is repulsive.
  63. The Big Country
    For all this film's mighty pretensions, it does not get far beneath the skin of its conventional Western situation and its stock Western characters. It skims across standard complications and ends on a platitude.
  64. Earwig
    Hadzihalilovic is an expert conjurer of other worlds, and “Earwig” unearths a startlingly seductive array of visual and sonic textures that don’t quite add up to much more than a powerful mood.
  65. The Secret Life of Pets
    The Secret Life of Pets is adequate animated entertainment, amusing while it lasts but not especially memorable except as a catalog of compromises and missed opportunities.
  66. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    It’s a frequently amusing, occasionally hilarious, rarely unpleasant grab bag of mild mockery and inspired lunacy, decked out with cameos from beloved comic performers and random celebrities.
  67. New Jack City
    The film's flamboyant portrait of Nino may be stereotypical, but Mr. Snipes makes it chilling.
  68. The Jerk
    By turns funny, vulgar and backhandedly clever, never more so than when it aspires to absolute stupidity. And Mr. Martin, who began his career with an arrow stuck through his head, has since developed a real genius for playing dumb.
  69. The Motel Life
    The story may be slight, but the performances and ambience resonate.
  70. Lingua Franca
    The mood is meditative, the camera patient; yet the film is too dramatically shy and narratively slight to stir.
  71. Heart Eyes
    It’s hard to discern who the film is for when it feels as if it’s been passed around genre writing classes in search of an identity.
  72. After the Storm
    Directed by Hilla Medalia with exactly the right balance of musical theater and personal drama, After the Storm presents a touching affirmation of the healing power of right-brain stimulation.
  73. The Portuguese Nun
    The Portuguese Nun has wit and feeling, though the wit is at times almost imperceptibly subtle and the feeling somewhat stylized.
  74. El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
    Anyone looking for the lowdown on haute cuisine will be sorely disappointed: devoid of emotion, context or narrative, the baffling avant-garde techniques and extreme politesse of the lab become oppressively dull.
  75. Harvest
    During this meticulously written and exquisitely acted film, you come to sense the bonds and the wounds binding three generations of Monopolis, who definitely love one another, but with reservations.
  76. Honor Flight
    The film might have made a decent end-of-broadcast segment on a newscast. But inflated to feature length and devoid of nuance or fresh insights, it just seems self-congratulatory - aren't we great for having done this for these old guys? - and exploitive.
  77. Bidder 70
    Wisely deciding to refrain from rapping our knuckles with greenhouse gas statistics and Al Gore-style pie charts, the filmmakers fashion a portrait of a conscience spurred to action by an unexpected opportunity.
  78. The Yes Men Are Revolting
    The Yes Men Are Revolting, their third film, has a personal poignancy that is missing in the forerunners, “The Yes Men” (2003) and “The Yes Men Fix the World” (2009).
  79. Along for the Ride
    As moving as Mr. de la Manitou’s testimony sometimes is, this movie too often feels like a credulity-straining attempt at hagiography.
  80. The Return of the Pink Panther
    The screenplay is funny but even better are the sight gags that are a kind of inventory of everything Clouseau has been unable to master in his long, irrelevant career.
  81. Sputnik
    While Sputnik doesn’t make its substantial borrowings from other sci-fi pictures entirely new, it does juice them up enough to yield a genuinely scary and satisfying experience.
  82. Babylon
    There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.
  83. 36 Hours
    What is annoying about this picture is that the set-up for pulling off the plot is just too slick and artificial, too patly and elaborately contrived.
  84. The Assassination Bureau
    Like an old electric automobile, the movie rolls forward, without surprises, steadily and almost soundlessly, except for the bomb explosion on the soundtrack. It's never as funny as it looks, but it's a pleasant enough ride if you like your companions.
  85. Don't Bother to Knock
    It requires a good deal to play a person who is strangely jangled in the head. And, unfortunately, all the equipment that Miss Monroe has to handle the job are a childishly blank expression and a provokingly feeble, hollow voice. With these she makes a game endeavor to pull something out of the role, but it looks as though she and her director, Roy Baker, were not quite certain what.
  86. Cool It
    Cool It finally blossoms into an engrossing, brain-tickling picture as many of Al Gore's meticulously graphed assertions are systematically - and persuasively - refuted.
  87. Daniel Isn't Real
    What starts as a mediocre psychological thriller finishes as a surprisingly toothsome and creative horror film, complete with creature features and journeys into the abyss.
  88. Suncoast
    With commendable wit and zero self-pity, Chinn sketches the daily surreality of her teenage analogue.
  89. Rush Hour
    At regular intervals the film stops short for similiarly nifty Chan choreography, letting the star flip, swivel, scamper up walls and hurl large objects with his feet.
  90. Red Heat
    Red Heat is a topically entertaining variation on the sort of action-adventure nonsense that plays best on television. Mr. Hill's touch is heavy when he takes himself seriously. However, he has a real gift for instantly disposable fantasy.
  91. Oculus
    A derivative but efficient chiller that cribs from “Solaris,” “The Shining” and “The Amityville Horror” yet also shows glimmers of imagination.
  92. The Kings of Summer
    The best way to enjoy The Kings of Summer is to view it as a likable comic fantasy dreamed up by filmmakers (Chris Galletta wrote the screenplay) who are close enough to adolescence to infuse their ramshackle story with a youthful, carefree whimsy.
  93. To Be or Not to Be
    Smashingly funny...This To Be or Not to Be scarcely misses a comic beat right from the opening sequence.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Broken English
    A well-acted, smartly directed film that’s depressing because it could have amounted to so much more. It departs from the studio-financed romantic-comedy template in just one, unfortunately fatal respect: it makes a point of pride out of rejecting cliché, then swoons into its embrace.
  95. Barrymore
    Mr. Plummer stumbles beautifully, poignantly and often, leering and searching through a haze of memory or, with concern edged with panic, calling for "a line, a line" much as Richard III calls for a horse.
  96. The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales
    The centering of Abigail Disney’s voice — we also see her tweets calling out the outrageous salaries of Disney executives — makes the documentary a kind of personal reckoning and an attempt to get through to other wealthy individuals, though one wonders how a film that doubles as a “Capitalism for Dummies” video would make an impact. Instead, the documentary wants, above all, to make sure we know how one particular Disney feels.
  97. Peter Pan & Wendy
    These well-meaning choices struggle to cohere into a satisfying picture.
  98. Drift
    Drift, a patient character study set on a craggy Greek island, proves a mesmerizing showcase for the actress Cynthia Erivo’s talents.
  99. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things
    Last year, “Palm Springs” proved that the time-loop conceit from “Groundhog Day” still had some laughs in it. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things shows it’s a perfectly fine pretext for teenage treacle.
  100. Romper Stomper
    While enticing you to hate the gang and take delight in everything bad that happens to its members, the film also gives you the vicarious thrill of being one of the gang.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »