The New York Times' Scores

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:
20280 movie reviews
  1. Kusama is still figuring out how to balance form and pulp, but she has a singular unapologetic idea about what women can and cannot do onscreen, one she lets rip with verve and her superbly unbound star.
  2. There’s some fun in watching Wael con his students into learning — while also teaching them the art of the con — but the film . . . can’t keep the sentiment at bay for long.
  3. The director, Levan Tsikurishvili, never reconciles the movie’s competing impulses. It’s part promotional video, part backstage doc and — in retrospect — part tragedy.
  4. The cultural transformation and re-transformation of Miami Beach (specifically its southern tip, South Beach) is a story that’s fascinating, poignant, garish and, in some ways, befuddling.
  5. Part of the thrill of heist movies is in watching a caper take shape before its execution. But the director, Steven Quale, rushes through the planning stages; there’s no obstacle that can’t be overcome with a quick line of exposition.
  6. While fragments of past, present and who-knows-what events flash past, Cage, bless him, fully commits to the nuttiness.
  7. The movie is filled with ordinary and surprising beauty, with gleaming and richly textured surfaces, and the kind of velvety black chiaroscuro you can get lost in. Its greatest strengths, though, are its two knockout leads, who give the story its heat, its flesh and its heartbreak.
  8. What makes the movie interesting — and disturbing on a few different levels — is how its sentimental, inspirational elements do battle with darker impulses.
  9. This is Jenny from the blah.
  10. It’s just two and a half years of — sorry, two and a half hours — of oceanic screen savers and hair that won’t stop undulating so we know when we’re underwater.
  11. The American Meme is a polemic as shallow and artificial as it thinks its subjects are.
  12. There’s a lot to like here, particularly Steinfeld’s performance.
  13. What’s odd here is how closely the new movie follows the original’s arc without ever capturing its bliss or tapping into its touching delicacy of feeling.
  14. Vice offers more than Yuletide rage-bait for liberal moviegoers, who already have plenty to be mad about. Revulsion and admiration lie as close together as the red and white stripes on the American flag, and if this is in some respects a real-life monster movie, it’s one that takes a lively and at times surprisingly sympathetic interest in its chosen demon.
  15. Capernaum, a sprawling tale wrenched from real life, goes beyond the conventions of documentary or realism into a mode of representation that doesn’t quite have a name. It’s a fairy tale and an opera, a potboiler and a news bulletin, a howl of protest and an anthem of resistance.
  16. Something feels off with von Trier’s sense of artistry now. Something feels stuck, like his head’s wound up lodged in his rear, which brings the movie closer to “The Human Centipede” than I would have thought. But this isn’t cinematic horror. It’s proctology.
  17. The story shifts and lumbers toward redemption that Earl doesn’t earn and that sentimentalizes a movie that is never especially good and often teasingly offensive but also fitfully entertaining and willfully perverse.
  18. The more time Khaled’s camera takes to wend its way around Hassane’s suspended body, the more its caresses seem to match all the embracing and caressing Hassane’s friend does. And the more time the movie devotes to the parts of this one man’s body the more that care seems to stand in for a country’s neglected whole.
  19. The young director Romain Gavras does not reinvent the comic caper in the French film The World Is Yours, but he revitalizes that genre with pop verve, goofy humor and visual sophistication. A flamboyant turn from Isabelle Adjani doesn’t hurt either, with the star sending up her own image as an aloof leading lady.
  20. Along with the loving portraiture are elements of peculiar mystery.
  21. Despite its intense running time and disturbing subject matter, Dead Souls does not seek a complete accounting. In fact, it’s partly about the inability to convey the full horror of these experiences.
  22. It’s never boring but a trifle diffuse. If you’re a Miyazaki fan, you’ll want to see it anyway.
  23. Ghostbox Cowboy feels like a William Gibson adaptation directed by David Lynch and Jean-Luc Godard — while not directly lifting from or nodding to those artists. It’s rare that a release so late in the year is so noteworthy, but this is a genuine find.
  24. This film lays bare how the American health care system seems designed, at every level, to fail the mentally ill and those who try to be of genuine service to them.
  25. The squelching of promise is not my worst (cinematic) fear, per se. But it’s still disappointing.
  26. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse contains a vital element that has been missing from too many recent superhero movies: fun.
  27. When Jenkins is true to himself, he soars; he stumbles, though, when he’s overly faithful to the novel or doesn’t trust the audience.
  28. As these things go, Mortal Engines offers a fair amount of fun.
  29. Vox Lux is an audacious story about a survivor who becomes a star, and a deeply satisfying, narratively ambitious jolt of a movie.
  30. It looks beautiful and moves swiftly but never quite takes full imaginative flight.

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