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. Temblores
    Bustamante renders the film’s distinct milieus with extraordinary texture. The sanitized and soulless spaces of Pablo and his family form an evocative contrast with the lively, bustling bars and streets frequented by Francisco. But this emphasis on sensory detail comes at the cost of the big picture.
  2. Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
    Squaring the Circle is slick and enjoyable enough, but it is also, like the company it chronicles, something of a boutique item, and the reminiscences grow faintly monotonous after a while.
  3. The Hidden Blade
    Though less powerful than Mr. Yamada's "Twilight Samurai" (2002), The Hidden Blade is an affecting portrait of the impact of profound change on people with limited options.
  4. The Iron Ministry
    The Iron Ministry is neither boring nor confining, which is just to say that it’s not a long trip through a faraway country. It’s a work of art — vivid and mysterious and full of life.
  5. Witness for the Prosecution
    For a courtroom melodrama pegged to a single plot device--a device that, of course, everybody promises not to reveal--the Arthur Hornblow Jr. film production of the Agatha Christie play "Witness for the Prosecution" comes off extraordinarily well. This results mainly from Billy Wilder's splendid staging of some splintering courtroom scenes and a first-rate theatrical performance by Charles Laughton in the defense-attorney role.
  6. 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.
  7. Boys Go to Jupiter
    Here is a movie notably unafraid to manifest the weirdest of the weird, no matter what the Mr. Moolahs of the world have to say.
  8. (500) Days of Summer
    Slight, charming and refreshingly candid little picture.
  9. The Man Who Knew Too Much
    Even in mammoth VistaVision, the old Hitchcock thriller-stuff has punch.
  10. Me and You and Everyone We Know
    Though her movie has a clear narrative line, and might even be classified as romantic comedy, it is also a meticulously constructed visual artifact, diffidently introducing the playful, rebus-like qualities of installation art to the conventions of narrative cinema.
  11. Spencer
    Stewart leverages her own star power to turn Diana into someone familiar. The intimacy and care the character craves is something the audience feels compelled to supply.
  12. The Image Book
    I found it haunting, thrilling and confounding in equal measure. It is a work of ecstatic despair, an argument for the futility of human effort that almost refutes itself through the application of a grumpy and tenacious artistic will.
  13. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    Intensely appealing.
  14. The Revenant
    Mr. Iñárritu isn’t content to merely seduce you with ecstatic beauty and annihilating terror; he wants to blow your mind, to amp up your art-house experience with blockbusterlike awesomeness.
  15. La grande strada azzurra
    A political movie that, partly through the powerful lead performance of its star, the relatively young Yves Montand, transcends its own politics.
  16. Natasha
    Mr. Bezmozgis creates a disturbing portrait of a girl turned calculating and nihilistic by her upbringing, and there is no coyness here.
  17. The Kingmaker
    It’s an ugly story shrewdly told, with a sense of humor and also a deeper feeling for history.
  18. Incredible But True
    Coming in at a tight and talky 74 minutes, Incredible but True is a sweetly absurd time-travel comedy that coats its lunacy in a touching poignancy.
  19. Cassandro
    Williams, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, is an expert orchestrator of naturalism. The trouble is that lucha libre, built on glitz, is anything but naturalistic. The self-assured freedom Saúl channels in bed never makes its way into scenes in the ring, which tend to tire when they should dazzle.
  20. Night Across the Street
    Unlike his precursors Georges Franju and Luis Buñuel, who reveled in the shock of incongruity, Mr. Ruiz took it in stride. His gliding, floating camera could make wild impossibilities look utterly natural. And so it is in Night Across the Street, where the present commingles with the past, and seeming is another way of being.
  21. House Party
    Unlike most teen-age movies, which attempt to impose some kind of adult order and significance on the events they recall, House Party has the light touch, rude wit and immediacy of rap as improvised by someone in top form.
  22. La Piscine
    Pretty people behaving poorly in beautiful settings is something we don’t see as much of in cinema as we used to. This is a master class in the subgenre, and one of unusual depth.
  23. The Music Man
    It's here, and the rich, ripe roundness of it, the lush amalgam of the many elements of successful American show business that Mr. Willson brought together on the stage, has been preserved and appropriately made rounder and richer through the magnitude of film.
  24. No Sudden Move
    The schematic for No Sudden Move remains perfectly intact, and the thing itself works pretty much according to the specifications. A consumer-rating agency would give it high marks for safety and efficiency, but it never leaves the showroom.
  25. Safe
    Brilliantly as it begins, Safe eventually succumbs to its own modern malady, as the film maker insists on a chilly ambiguity that breeds more detachment than interest.
  26. Stutz
    A film that skillfully navigates vulnerability, brainy insights and artistry.
  27. Sisu: Road to Revenge
    It’s gloriously, audaciously silly, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a good time.
  28. Stronger
    Stronger takes more artistic risks than any other American-made “inspired by true events” picture I can recall.
  29. Smoke Signals
    Shows colorful style and a wisdom beyond precocity about its setting and its people.
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