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. Fightville
    Spiked with energy and attitude, the nonfiction movie Fightville takes a fast look at a few men who, for pleasure and sometimes profit, like to smack and take down other men while practicing mixed martial arts.
  2. Caroline and Jackie
    With low-key, almost guileless performances, the film demonstrates that no matter how intelligent, well thought out and potentially enlightened a current sociological method (e.g., the “loving intervention”) may be, people will always find a way to turn it into something ludicrous, aggressive or both.
  3. Dracula
    Jude is an interesting, admirably unorthodox filmmaker who likes to push his viewers. Here, he simply punishes us.
  4. Allied
    It’s not so much a work of art as a triumph of craft, and therefore a reminder of the deep pleasures of old-fashioned technique and long experience.
  5. (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies
    Because the film doesn’t begin to explore the wider implications of that loss of trust, its findings don’t add up to more than a sardonic gloss on a provocative subject.
  6. Streit's: Matzo and the American Dream
    Despite much talk of diversity and tradition, Mr. Levine has little fresh to say about gentrification issues or documentary storytelling.
  7. Fugitive Pieces
    For a tale spiked with so much torment, Fugitive Pieces feels remarkably soothing.
  8. Dredd
    Every so often there's a suggestion that a police state may actually be a lousy idea, but this thought dies even faster than the disposable characters.
  9. A Sidewalk Astronomer
    An inspiring film about an inspired teacher. It should leave all viewers with an ounce of curiosity eager to hit the streets with Dobsonian telescopes of their own.
  10. The Adjustment Bureau
    One reason filmmakers like Mr. Nolfi seem attracted to Philip K. Dick's work, beyond the brilliance of its ideas, is that his unembellished writing style leaves them room to make the stories visually their own.
  11. The Ghosts in Our Machine
    The Ghosts in Our Machine is a compelling movie, but its argument expands without deepening.
  12. Medusa Deluxe
    At a time when too many movies feel cautious and constrained, Medusa Deluxe is gloriously uninhibited and gaudily diverting.
  13. Bank of Dave
    Even if the movie is about one small win, there’s a sedate pleasure in seeing it play out, especially knowing a version of it happened in real life.
  14. Scream
    Throttled by a corrosive self-awareness, the latest Scream is a slasher movie with resting smug face, so enamored of its own mythology that its characters speak of little else.
  15. C.O.G.
    Despite smatterings of wit and a stable of skilled performers, C.O.G. struggles to find a consistent tone, its episodic structure veering from farcical to poignant to dangerously raw.
  16. The White Countess
    With its tentative pace, fussy, pieced-together structure and stuffy emotional climate, The White Countess never develops any narrative stamina.
  17. American Teacher
    American Teacher doesn't come close to doing what it sets out to do, but it does end up as a heartfelt, bittersweet portrait of several teachers.
  18. Lightyear
    Lightyear, directed by Angus MacLane from a script by Jason Headley, aims to please by pandering, to be good-enough entertainment. As such, it succeeds in a manner more in line with second-tier Disney animation than with top-shelf Pixar.
  19. Overlord
    As seen in the film’s terrifying opening and its gruesome climax, Avery deftly orchestrates some grisly, intense set pieces. He delivers on the thrills, even if the story leaves something to be desired.
  20. Return to the Land of Wonders
    An on-the-fly diary of events and impressions that offers insight into the challenges of extracting democracy from chaos.
  21. Men on the Bridge
    A powerful portrait of working-class Istanbul that artfully suggests a wellspring of found moments. Quietly, steadily, it gathers a resonance belying its slice-of-life scale.
  22. Judgment at Nuremberg
    On the point of the fundamental issue in the Nazi war guilt trials that were held in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II, Stanley Kramer, the producer-director, has pinned a powerful, persuasive film. The major weakness, perhaps, of the whole thing is that it is inevitably compressive and sometimes glib. The strength and wonder of it is that it manages to say so much that still needs to be said.
  23. GOAT
    It’s a story with few surprises and mostly rudimentary emotional concepts, but is enlivened by artwork with colorful texture and a dynamic animation style.
  24. Blind Mountain
    Blind Mountain is a reminder that art sometimes keeps the truth alive far better than the news.
  25. Ne Me Quitte Pas
    Ne Me Quitte Pas...is soberingly adept at portraying the tedium of drunken life. Whether it actually avoids emulating said tedium depends on how engaging you find its two stooges. I was sympathetic without being wholly charmed.
  26. Family
    Thoroughly good-natured and with a handful of decent jokes (like Kate McKinnon as a vulpine suburban mom), Family would be more interesting if, instead of trying to rewire Kate, it just admitted that her harsh honesty and benign neglect were more beneficial to Maddie than her mother’s anxious hovering.
  27. K-Pops!
    It has its momentary charms, mostly when it’s just .Paak and Rasheed riffing off each other, with the buoyant chemistry of a real father and son, or, when we see .Paak be less BJ under K-pop’s bright lights and more himself, just the artist with a mic and a set of drums.
  28. Notorious
    Notorious settles into a curious comfort zone; it's half pop fable, half naturalistic docudrama. Not a bad movie, but nowhere near as strong as its soundtrack.
  29. Motherless Brooklyn
    The high-mindedness of the movie, its showy conviction that its heart is in the right place, dulls some of its political insights. And its grandiosity undermines the ragged pleasures of the genre.
  30. The Whale
    As an exploration of — and argument for — the power of human sympathy, The Whale is undone by simplistic psychologizing and intellectual fuzziness.
  31. Great Expectations
    Containing enough characters and subplots for three movies, the novel has been nearly suffocated by Mr. Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”) and his screenwriter, David Nicholls, in an effort to get everything in.
  32. Warm Bodies
    Warm Bodies is an improbable romance sweetened with appealing performances and buoyed by one of the better cute meets in recent romantic comedy.
  33. Crawl
    A smoothly efficient popcorn picture...Though Scodelario is spunky and game in what must have been an extremely uncomfortable shoot, the script (by the brothers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen) is airless and repetitive.
  34. With All Deliberate Speed
    Mr. Gilbert wants a movie with both a golden glow and a corrosive center, something he has not quite achieved here.
  35. Handsome Devil
    As in many a high school movie, it’s the seasoned teacher who brings the best out of his pupils, and here Mr. Scott draws the hidden potential not only from his students but also from the film.
  36. The Mercy
    In prioritizing Crowhurst’s psychological frailty over his physical challenges (both conveyed more evocatively in the excellent 2007 documentary “Deep Water”), Firth and his director find something quietly touching, even soulful, in the character’s wretchedness. In this somber tragedy, the real demons are never anywhere but right inside that boat.
  37. Matthias & Maxime
    This exploration of suppressed homoerotic longing would be infinitely more moving if the pair had even a smidgen of sexual chemistry.
  38. What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?
    The film frames them as having been somehow embroiled in a political situation, rather than actively, knowingly engaged in it — and its attempts to remain apolitical and focus on the music are as naïve as the band’s.
  39. Sierra Burgess Is a Loser
    There’s sharp dialogue throughout.
  40. McFarland USA
    Aims to be rousing rather than revelatory, and it mostly succeeds.
  41. The Neon Bible
    When a poetically inclined film fixates on the same image too often, it is a sign that the movie may have succumbed to its own dreamy esthetic. That is one of the problems of The Neon Bible, the English director Terence Davies's hallucinatory portrait of the American South half a century ago.
  42. Bride Flight
    Best enjoyed as a lavish period travelogue whose story is dwarfed by its panoramic overview.
  43. Gloomy Sunday
    The story is so schematically histrionic that the bringing in of the Holocaust late in the day feels exploitative and unearned. Gloomy Sunday is an oddity that takes itself much too seriously.
  44. Stillwater
    It’s clear that Damon and McCarthy have thought through this man in considered detail, from Bill’s plaid shirts to his tightly clenched walk. The character looks as if he hasn’t moved his bowels in weeks; if anything, he feels overworked, a product of too much conceptualizing and not enough feeling, identifiable humanity or sharp ideas.
  45. The Wedding Singer
    Half the film is an ingenuous love story, but the better half consists of pop culture time-warp jokes set in 1985.
  46. Magical Universe
    While Mr. Workman evidently respects Mr. Carbee’s talent, he also frames his movie as a trite narrative about a kind of lovably odd acquaintance who comes out of his shell, without many incisive ideas about shaping or broadening the material.
  47. The Star Chamber
    It is a great disappointment, halfway into the movie, to find The Star Chamber so far off the track that its credibility almost entirely disappears...The Star Chamber has a well- meaning urgency, and it is an entertaining film even when it becomes so thoroughly misguided.
  48. New Gods: Yang Jian
    Even for fans of this animated universe, New Gods: Yang Jian can’t turn its viewers into believers.
  49. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
    The movie manages to provide moments of witty dialogue while moving forward with its spiritual duties.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Song of the Thin Man
    While Song of the Thin Man is no world beater, it still is a mighty pleasant picture to have around.
  51. The Nowhere Inn
    Formally lively, The Nowhere Inn is a true meta exercise in the sense that the more derivative and self-conscious its conceptual gambits seem (stick around: The reflexivity continues after the end credits), the more it proves its ostensible point.
  52. A Perfect Day
    A serviceable, watchable movie.
  53. Cool Runnings
    A cute, buoyant sports fantasy, jolted along by a reggae soundtrack and playfully acted by an appealing cast. This new Disney comedy is slick, funny and warmhearted, very much in the old-fashioned Disney mode.
  54. Mr. Nice
    An affable throwback to those guilt-free days when hippie drug dealers radiated the glamorous aura of avant-garde heroes risking prison to spread the doctrine of liberation through cannabis.
  55. State of Grace
    With coolly expressive cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth and an insinuating Ennio Morricone score, State of Grace has a somber and chilling tone that is only occasionally breached.
  56. Guys and Balls
    The climactic game provides an opportunity for some of the most sustained - and literal - gay bashing in movie history, even if the outcome is no more surprising than that of any other underdog comedy.
  57. In Paris
    Picks up where the early François Truffaut and his comrades-in-cinema left off -- with a playful, liberatory style, and a song (actually, a few) in his heart and on his actors’ lips.
  58. Aporia
    A deeply silly time-travel weepie buoyed solely by the soapy warmth of its performances.
  59. Christopher Robin
    The contemporary in-jokes are kept to a minimum (O.K., Tigger says “let’s bounce”), and the movie as a whole feels pleasingly old-fashioned.
  60. Rooms for Tourists
    Mr. Bogliano, just 19 at the start of production, has made a promising debut that consistently hits the right creepy points while exhibiting impressive gory effects created with extremely limited resources.
  61. Day of the Dead
    Day of the Dead has a less startling setting, since most of it takes place underground. But it still affords Mr. Romero the opportunity for intermittent philosophy and satire, without compromising his reputation as the grisliest guy around.
  62. Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made
    There isn’t enough in the way of good jokes or clever references to investigators of yore to make the film appealing, and the flatness of Timmy’s delivery, which is supposed to scan as deadpan, doesn’t contain enough nuances to make much of the humor land.
  63. Total Recall
    Mr. Verhoeven is much better at drumming up this sort of artificial excitement than he is at knowing when to stop.
  64. The Concert
    The harder this desperately obsequious circus of a movie tries to entertain, the more it falls short.
  65. Wonder Woman 1984
    Patty Jenkins is behind the camera again, but this time without the confidence. Certainly some of the problems can be pinned on the uninterestingly janky script, a mess of goofy jokes, storytelling clichés and dubious politics.
  66. Battle in Heaven
    Working again with Diego Martínez Vignatti, the cinematographer for "Japón," the director doesn't just seize our attention; he commands it - forcing us into a world of terror and beauty.
  67. Body of War
    There is another body of war at issue here, however, and it’s this body that throws the documentary off kilter and eventually off course: Congress.
  68. Ophelia
    It’s an interesting exercise and, for the most part, a passably diverting one.
  69. The American Meme
    The American Meme is a polemic as shallow and artificial as it thinks its subjects are.
  70. The Heat
    The volatile chemistry between Ms. McCarthy and Ms. Bullock is something to behold, and carries The Heat through its lazy conception and slapdash execution.
  71. Bad Times at the El Royale
    Goddard keeps everything smoothly, ebbing and flowing as the characters separate and join together, but at some point during this logy 2-hour-and-21-minute exercise you want something more substantial than even Hemsworth’s admittedly mesmerizing snaky hips.
  72. To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar
    Though he and his co-stars tackle their roles with mischievous humor, Beeban Kidron's direction stays flat even when the actors are funny.
  73. Red Doors
    This agreeable, lightweight movie, written and directed by Georgia Lee, turns the malaises of a suburban family into bittersweet farce that teeters between cheeky humor and surface pathos.
  74. Machete
    For all its political button pushing, Machete is too preposterous to qualify as satire. The only viewers it is likely to upset are the same kind of people who once claimed that the purple Tinky Winky in "Teletubbies" promoted a gay agenda.
  75. The Choral
    A moving account of music as a way of coping with war, as well as keeping it at bay.
  76. In Her Shoes
    The joy of this unassuming, generous film is that it never sells out its characters' desires or ours.
  77. The Visit
    Shows so much intelligence and compassion that its tendency sometimes to overreach or underdramatize can surely be forgiven.
  78. Under solen
    It has the melancholy mildew of both "Marty" and the 1940's weepie "The Enchanted Cottage."
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    All I Wanna Do
    Surprisingly pleasant, thanks to smart, unstereotyped performances.
  80. Illuminata
    Summons the stock characters of behind-the-scenes theater stories and affectionately invests them with new life.
  81. The Governess
    Because the cinematography of The Governess is so richly panoramic, the movie forces you to contemplate the emotional power exerted by film.
  82. Tomorrowland
    Its idea of the future is abstract, theoretical and empty, and it can only fill in the blank space with exhortations to believe and to hope. But belief without content, without a critical picture of the world as it is, is really just propaganda. Tomorrowland, searching for incitements to dream, finds slogans and mistakes them for poetry.
  83. Triple Threat
    At times, the film’s demand for teamwork precludes satisfying payoffs.
  84. Point Break
    Point Break, though it's anything but watertight where plotting is concerned, again reveals Ms. Bigelow's real talents as a director of fast-paced, high-adrenaline action. Whenever the flakiness of Point Break threatens to become lulling, Ms. Bigelow wakes up her audience with a formidable jolt.
  85. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
    “Jeannette” throws the modern back at the medieval, making no distinction between religious ecstasy and that experienced in certain contemporary contexts of music and ritual. It’s a provocative proposition that yields a film of genuine spiritual dimension.
  86. Days of Thunder
    Tony Scottmdoes his utmost to pump up the audience's adrenaline at all times, which means that the film's big moments - the races, the crashes, the news that someone needs brain surgery - don't seem that different from the small ones.
  87. What Would Jesus Buy?
    At the very least, the documentary What Would Jesus Buy? might make a viewer think twice about that next purchase at the Gap.
  88. Tumbledown
    We’re meant to warm to Hannah and Andrew as they wear each other down with good-natured ribbing. But Ms. Hall and Mr. Sudeikis hardly warm up themselves, showing little chemistry and looking unsure how to play the film’s tone, or the would-be zingers.
  89. Love Is All You Need
    As Love Is All You Need ties up its loose ends, it settles into a rom-com formula with a predictable, upbeat ending. It feels good, sort of.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    L'iceberg
    Its simultaneously silly and grave tone finds humor in the characters' delusions and obsessions while celebrating their uniqueness.
  91. On My Way
    Because Ms. Deneuve, 70, is in almost every scene, On My Way feels like Ms. Bercot’s loving character study of a star who has always stood above the fray, a symbol of resilient Gallic femininity.
  92. The Offering
    A serviceable slab of possession horror.
  93. Three Thousand Years of Longing
    Despite Miller’s talent and feverish enthusiasm, and the gravitational pull of his stars, the movie’s colorful parts just whir and stop, a pinwheel in unsteady wind.
  94. Scanners
    Unfortunately the plot thickens so rapidly and so lumpily that one very soon loses interest in spite of the quite stunning and gory special effects.
  95. Darling
    Mickey Keating’s horror outing Darling manages to conjure an effectively unsettling miasma.
  96. Protocols of Zion
    Makes it case expertly and powerfully, but it does not propose a solution. The cumulative effect of the film's message is enormous sadness that hate is so strong and so resistant to reason.
  97. Dark Night
    Until its climax, which clearly seeks to be congratulated on its restraint, Dark Night is not much more than an arty bore.
  98. Over the Moon
    Over the Moon deserves credit for launching an unflinching lesson about grief. If only it had taken a different flight path.
  99. At Middleton
    Yes, it’s full of droll humor, but it’s also a bittersweet portrait of two people, who, in the process of helping their children choose a college, confront the emptiness of their respective marriages.
  100. The Last Sentence
    Although its black-and-white visuals catch the eye, The Last Sentence soon loosens its hold on your attention by flooding the story with mind-numbing, uninteresting details while real history slips through the cracks.
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