The New York Times' Scores

For 20,311 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:
20311 movie reviews
  1. A movie in which the human comedy is by turns tender, plaintive, heartfelt and joyful.
  2. The satire is cautious and the emotions restrained, so that what should be a swirl of lust, ambition, recrimination and bureaucratic absurdity rises only to genteel, nervous laughter and mild discomfort.
  3. The performers don’t seem like they’re acting at all, which contributes to the film’s unsettling power. The elliptical narrative structure articulates a sad truth of the addict’s life concerning both the challenge and the tedium of making it through to the next fix.
  4. The movie, a scorching and rigorous essay on memory and accountability, is neither a profession of guilt nor a performance of virtue. Though his inquiry is intensely, at times painfully personal, Mr. Wilkerson is above all concerned with unpacking the mechanisms of racial domination.
  5. Suffused with sorcery and silvery light, November, written and directed by Rainer Sarnet, is a bizarre Estonian love story — a mishmash of folklore, farm animals and scabrous fun — in which beauty and ugliness fight to the death.
  6. The result is simultaneously elusive and concrete: abstract cinema that packs a punch.
  7. Anyone digging through the cemetery soil again had better have fresh ideas. The Cured, the debut feature from David Freyne, has roughly two.
  8. Are We Not Cats is a well-put-together film with a lot of striking imagery, but, as you may have already inferred, something of a specialty item.
  9. The director is Michael Sucsy, who is not always up to the challenges of the knotty material — we live in a world of mainstream movies with clumsy edits, but this one has more conspicuously bad cuts than most.
  10. Working with an uneven cast and an undercooked story, Mr. O’Malley hits the horror beats just fine (slam, creak, squeak) without putting a sinister spin on the assorted strange doings. For all the genre exertions, none of this feels the least bit spooky.
  11. Mr. Garland likes to play with tones, mixing deadpan in with the frights, and later “Annihilation” becomes something of a head movie, swirling with cosmic and menacingly lysergic visions. He keeps the tension torqued throughout this phantasmagoric interlude, sustaining the shivery unease that is one of this movie’s deeper satisfactions.
  12. The great virtue of The Young Karl Marx is its clarity, its ability to perceive the way the eddies of personal experience flow within the wider stream of history.
  13. The movie is a pointed reminder that Ms. McAdams is one of cinema’s most accomplished and appealing comic actresses. It’s almost heartbreaking to contemplate how amazing she would be in a new comedy that was more than intermittently O.K.
  14. For all of its failings, the movie sometimes manages to bring a scary whiff of the street into its sounds and images.
  15. The result is a good-looking but overstuffed genre pileup that confuses as often as it compels.
  16. The Party is a brittle, unfunny attempt at comedy that features some very fine actors and a lot of empty chatter.
  17. A soggy string of Hallmark moments designed to interrogate the value of the objects we cherish, the movie is front-loaded with major stars and squelching with sentiment.
  18. Western is as precise as a dropped pin on a GPS map, which makes its sense of mystery all the more powerful.
  19. How, and in whose apartment, Diana and Ben will confess their emotions is the subject of Ms. Brooks’s pallid dramedy, which leaves its actors looking somewhat stranded, as if waiting for Neil Simon zingers that were never written.
  20. The genius of Early Man is that it cannot possibly be spoiled. The animation is foolproof in its combination of ingenuity and obviousness, and the script obliterates the difference between a laugher and a groaner.
  21. Subtlety and aesthetic elegance — the jerky animation complements the blunt tone — are not among the film’s virtues. Tehran Taboo aims to expose systemic hypocrisy; in that respect, it is brisk and bracing.
  22. Double Lover, which Mr. Ozon “freely adapted” from the Joyce Carol Oates book “Lives of the Twins,” spins its influences into a frenzy that ultimately reveals the story to be very much its own thing. And a crazy, and eventually strangely moving, thing it is. As elaborate as its visuals are, the movie is also intimate.
  23. Mr. Perry is such a good filmmaker that he can make the embarrassing and the unbearable insistently, fascinatingly engrossing (and often funny).
  24. As popular as this window-fogging franchise has become, its flaccid finale is likely critic proof. But if I can persuade just one of you to bypass its milquetoast masochism and watch the stratospherically superior “9 1/2 Weeks” instead, then I will have done my job.
  25. With tender performances and dubious conclusions, this story is best appreciated as an explanation for why people seek out the false comfort of gendered pseudoscience. But by fitting characters into formulas, The Female Brain fails to observe the flexibility of human experience.
  26. Impressively photographed and perkily paced, Jason Filiatrault’s story never droops quite as much as its lead character, injecting a welcome poignancy that tempers the cuteness.
  27. Perhaps recognizing their biggest asset, the directors, Elizabeth Rohrbaugh and Daniel Powell, allow Ms. Hall’s numbers to play out at length... If the screenplay perhaps backs itself into a corner, its irresolution feels true to life.
  28. If unwise remarks at a dinner can cast a pall over a longstanding relationship, then a great ending can redeem and even force reconsideration of an otherwise middling film.
  29. Its story line is clean; the live-action actors, particularly Rose Byrne (as Bea, an artist who paints portraits of the bunnies), bring their onscreen-appeal A game; and the computer-generated animals are charming, albeit lacking in the particular gentle winsomeness of Potter’s originals.
  30. A documentary that’s remarkably engaging despite treating its rough-and-tumble hero with kid gloves.

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