The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. The China Syndrome
    James Bridges's smashingly effective, very stylish suspense melodrama.
  2. Ghostbox Cowboy
    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.
  3. Island of the Hungry Ghosts
    Ethereal, intensely moving.
  4. Mean Streets
    No matter how bleak the milieu, no matter how heartbreaking the narrative, some films are so thoroughly, beautifully realized they have a kind of tonic effect that has no relation to the subject matter. Such a film is Mean Streets.
  5. The Little Mermaid
    A marvel of skillful animation, witty songwriting and smart planning. It is designed to delight filmgoers of every conceivable stripe.
  6. Birds of Passage
    Instead of stepping back to explain the beliefs and practices of its main characters, it plunges you into the reality of their lives, trusting that both their humanity and their distinctiveness will be apparent, that they are no more inherently mysterious — or inherently noble — than anyone else.
  7. Burning
    While each event expands the narrative — filling in the larger picture with nods at sexual relations, class divisions and a riven people — they don’t necessarily explain what happens or answer the fundamental question that burns through this brilliant movie.
  8. Happy as Lazzaro
    A rich sense of mystery pervades this movie. You succumb to its strangeness the way that a child is enveloped in a bedtime story, trusting the teller even when you don’t fully understand the tale or know where it’s going.
  9. Long Day's Journey Into Night
    Its various components defy logical arrangement both as viewed and in retrospect. What they build up to is even more seductive than anything that led up to it — a moment of breathtaking romanticism that’s as intoxicating as it is unexpected.
  10. Shoplifters
    In the past, Kore-eda’s delicacy has at times enervated his movies. Here, though, the family’s toughness, thieving and secrets, its poverty and desperation, work like ballast on his sensibilities. In their grubby imperfections, Kore-eda finds a perfect story about being human.
  11. Capernaum
    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.
  12. A Star Is Born
    Those who have blissful recollections of David O. Selznick's A Star Is Born as probably the most affecting movie ever made about Hollywood may get themselves set for a new experience that should put the former one in the shade when they see Warner Brothers' and George Cukor's remake of the seventeen-year-old film.
  13. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
    It is a classic, as important cinematicaly as "The Birth of a Nation" or the birth of Mickey Mouse. Nothing quite like it has been done before; and already we have grown impolite enough to clamor for an encore. Another helping, please!
  14. Quest for Fire
    Quest for Fire is more than just a hugely enterprising science lesson, although it certainly is that. It's also a touching, funny and suspenseful drama about prehumans.
  15. Milford Graves Full Mantis
    You can get a lot of facts about Mr. Graves and his discography on the internet (and I recommend you do). This movie gives you, well, the man’s heart, and it’s a beautiful one.
  16. Little Women
    Like any good novelist and every great filmmaker, Gerwig isn’t afraid to let her audience work a little. She trusts our intelligence and our curiosity, and also her own command of the medium.
  17. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
    The movie remains one of the most startling and moving animated films ever. It is also, with the likes of “The 400 Blows,” “Kes,” and “Vagabond,” one of the finest films about being young in an indifferent world.
  18. At Eternity's Gate
    By adamantly focusing above all else on van Gogh’s work — and its transporting ecstasies — Schnabel has made not just an exquisite film but an argument for art.
  19. A Streetcar Named Desire
    Elia Kazan and a simply superlative cast have fashioned a motion picture that throbs with passion and poignancy.
  20. Little Odessa
    Little Odessa might have been a great film. Instead, it is an exceptionally good one, the kind that suggests the start of a powerful career.
  21. The Philadelphia Story
    Provided you have a little patience for the lavishly rich, which these folks are, you should have great fun at The Philadelphia Story. For Metro and Director George Cukor have graciously made it apparent, in the words of a character, that one of the "prettiest sights in this pretty world is the privileged classes enjoying their privileges." And so, in this instance, you will too.
  22. The Third Man
    Mr. Reed has brilliantly packaged the whole bad of his cinematic tricks, his whole range of inventive genius for making the camera expound. His eminent gifts for compressing a wealth of suggestion in single shots, for building up agonized tension and popping surprises are fully exercised. His devilishly mischievous humor also runs lightly through the film, touching the darker depressions with little glints of the gay or macabre. [3 Feb 1950, p.29]
  23. Crime + Punishment
    Crime+Punishment advances a thorough critique of American law enforcement not by generalizing or speechifying, but by digging into particular lives and circumstances, allowing affected individuals to speak for themselves.
  24. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    The filmmaker’s poetic logic is inextricable from his consciousness of race and community, and of his function and potential as an artist grappling with his own circumstances and those of the people he’s depicting. “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” is not a long film, but it contains whole worlds.
  25. Shadow of a Doubt
    You've got to hand it to Alfred Hitchcock: when he sows the fearful seeds of mistrust in one of his motion pictures he can raise more goose pimples to the square inch of a customer's flesh than any other director of thrillers in Hollywood.
  26. Notorious
    One of the more remarkable things about Notorious is that it hasn't seemed to age; if anything, it grows more timely. [26 Oct 1980, p.17]
    • The New York Times
  27. Charm City
    The film captures up close the way violence transforms neighborhoods and families with an immediacy that transcends headlines or sensationalism.
  28. The King and I
    Every bit of the humor and vibrant humanity that flowed through the tender story of the English school-teacher and the quizzical king is richly preserved in the screen play that Ernest Lehman has prepared.
  29. Rope
    Rope is not merely a stunt that is justified by the extraordinary career that contains it, but one of the movies that makes that career extraordinary.
  30. In Fabric
    The film spaces out several nasty and effective frights. And as its narrative seems to deliberately devolve into a dissociative dream, even the funny material hits with a choke in the throat.
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