The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 20,271 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: 9,377 out of 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. The King's Speech
    That film does have its attractions, notably in its two solid leads and standout support from Mr. Pearce.
  2. Fargo
    For all its exaggerated ordinariness, this film seems to start where others leave off.
  3. Parallel Mothers
    The central plot of Parallel Mothers is vintage Almodóvar: a skein of reversals, revelations, surprises and coincidences unraveled with style, wit and feeling.
  4. Hell or High Water
    Furnished with faces as beaten as the vehicles the brothers drive and discard, Hell or High Water is a chase movie disguised as a western. Its humor is as dry as prairie dust...and its morals are steadfastly gray.
  5. Up
    Passages of glorious imagination are invariably matched by stock characters and banal story choices.
  6. Shirkers
    Like a photograph slowly developing before our eyes, Shirkers (which was also the title of the original picture) is both mystery and manhunt, a captivating account of shattered friendship and betrayed trust. The skill of the editing (by Tan and two colleagues), though, is key.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mildred Pierce
    Mildred Pierce lacks the driving force of stimulating drama, and its denouement hardly comes as a surprise, but it is cut from a pattern that has been hugely successful in the past and it probably will be this time too.
  8. Poor Things
    It isn’t long into Poor Things that you start to feel as if you were being bullied into admiring a movie that’s so deeply self-satisfied there really isn’t room for the two of you.
  9. 45365
    Remarkable patchwork of unremarkable lives.
  10. Tootsie
    Tootsie is the best thing that's yet happened at this year end. It's a toot, a lark, a month in the country.
  11. Marooned in Iraq
    If Mr. Ghobadi's dominant theme is the devastation of the Kurds, his subdominant tone is one of strength, resistance and fertility.
  12. To Kill a Mockingbird
    Their charming enactments of a father and his children in that close relationship that can occur at only one brief period are worth all the footage of the film.
  13. Mr. SOUL!
    Broad in scope and rapidly paced, the film can feel as if it’s bursting at the seams. But it acutely conveys the radical joy that “Soul!” inspired, barely contained in the movie’s running time.
  14. Pictures of Ghosts
    Love suffuses Pictures of Ghosts, a cleareyed, deeply personal and formally inspired rumination on life, death, family, movies and those complicated, invariably haunted places we call home.
  15. Aquarius
    Aquarius is a marvelous and surprising act of portraiture, a long, unhurried encounter with a single, complicated person. And that is enough to make it a captivating film, an experience well worth seeking out. But there is also, as I’ve suggested, more going on than the everyday experiences of a modern matriarch.
  16. 2000 Meters to Andriivka
    “2000 Meters” is bruisingly intimate nonfiction.
  17. Slow Machine
    Difficult to describe and confounding to follow, the film is best when you submit to the surreal nature of it; then, you will be open to witnessing one of this year’s most mesmerizing movies unfold. Films of such lo-fi aesthetics rarely feel this major.
  18. Back to the Future
    Mr. Zemeckis is able both to keep the story moving and to keep it from going too far. He handles Back to the Future with the kind of inventiveness that indicates he will be spinning funny, whimsical tall tales for a long time to come.
  19. Everything Is Copy
    Digging into the psychological space between her wildly public life and intensely private death, Everything Is Copy is a pickle slathered in whipped cream. Just like its subject.
  20. Toy Story 2
    Making sure that computer-generated animation will never be the same.
  21. Black Panther
    It wouldn’t be a Marvel production without manly skirmishes and digital avatars. Yet in its emphasis on black imagination, creation and liberation, the movie becomes an emblem of a past that was denied and a future that feels very present. And in doing so opens up its world, and yours, beautifully.
  22. Cemetery of Splendor
    The mood Mr. Weerasethakul conjures is all the more extraordinary when you consider that the movie’s premise, in the hands of almost any other director, would be used to build some kind of horror movie.
  23. The Bridge on the River Kwai
    Brilliant is the word, and no other, to describe the quality of skills that have gone into the making of this picture, from the writing of the script out of a novel by the Frenchman Pierre Boulle, to direction, performance, photographing, editing and application of a musical score.
  24. The Human Voice
    Almodóvar’s sense of cinema design — the décor simulates a luxe apartment and lays it bare as a soundstage illusion — is acutely keyed to Swinton’s performance here, which projects mercurial emotion with Swiss watch precision.
  25. Brooklyn
    Brooklyn endows its characters with desires and aspirations, but not with foresight, and it examines the past with open-minded curiosity rather than with sentimentality or easy judgment.
  26. Nobody Knows
    Not for the faint of heart, though it has no scenes of overt violence, and barely a tear is shed. It is also strangely thrilling, not only because of the quiet assurance of Mr. Kore-eda's direction, but also because of his alert, humane sense of sympathy.
  27. Life Is Sweet
    Life Is Sweet, a title that should not be taken as irony, demands that the audience accept its meandering manner without expectations of the big dramatic event or the boffo laugh. It is very funny, but without splitting the sides.
  28. Mary Poppins
    And a most wonderful, cheering movie it is, with Julie Andrews, the original Eliza of My Fair Lady, playing the title role and with its splices and seams fairly splitting with Poppins marvels turned out by the Walt Disney studio.
  29. Apollo 11
    Although we know how the mission turns out, the movie generates and maintains suspense. And it rekindles a crazy sense of wonder at, among other things, what one can do practically with trigonometry.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Faces
    A really important movie about the American class, generation and marriage abyss.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »