The New York Times' Scores

For 20,312 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:
20312 movie reviews
  1. Mr. Schreiber has almost no physical resemblance to Wepner, in his heyday a burly, mustachioed redhead. Mr. Schreiber is a terrific actor, however, and he pulls it off. His portrayal works partly because of its understatement.
  2. The film, like its subject, frustrates in its inability to focus; there is no deep inquiry into what makes Anderson tick. It’s like skimming a stone across a lake.
  3. This is an essential film, but it is also a terribly dispiriting one.
  4. The whole enterprise is so fundamentally good-natured and fluffy that it’s sometimes hard to stay annoyed by it.
  5. Boone is slightly monotonous, and familiarity may be one cause.
  6. Buster’s Mal Heart is about the making of a madman. It also aspires, with less success, to philosophically query the void at the center of modern life and Christianity’s failure to fill it.
  7. The novel is at its most trenchantly funny when depicting the exhausting nature of virtual social life, and it’s in this area, too, that the movie gets its very few knowing laughs. But it’s plain, not much more than 15 minutes in, that without the story’s paranoid aspects you’re left with a conceptual framework that’s been lapped three times over.
  8. It’s a handsome package that never transcends the banality of its ideas, most of which involve how different people, including from Boulder, were affected by the case.
  9. It meanders from start to finish, searching for a tone that it never quite finds.
  10. It’s a study of courageous innovation against an entrenched medical orthodoxy.
  11. [A] taut and commanding primer.
  12. Like flipping through misplaced leaves in a photo book, the documentary maintains a free-flowing tone as it uncovers the work that went into creating some of the indelible scenes in Hollywood history.
  13. Mr. Bezmozgis creates a disturbing portrait of a girl turned calculating and nihilistic by her upbringing, and there is no coyness here.
  14. The movie dives into the black arts with methodical restraint and escalating unease.
  15. Dreary, derivative and flat-out dopey, this dragged-out torture tale will disappoint even those whose hearts race whenever they see a female character strapped to a bed.
  16. If you love the music Berns made, you’ll love this movie; if you don’t, I feel for you, but “Bang!” might nevertheless entertain with its dish.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It is modest, observant, graceful and nonchalantly witty.
  17. At its most enjoyable, Valerio Ruiz’s rambling profile cedes the floor to Ms. Wertmüller, who recalls her creative partnership with her husband, the production designer Enrico Job, and her cultural importance in representing Italy’s south onscreen.
  18. Teeming with acts both heroic and reprehensible, John Ridley’s wrenchingly humane documentary, Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992, reveals the Los Angeles riots as the almost inevitable culmination of a decade of heightening racial tensions.
  19. Here’s what sounds like one dud job: calculating bird populations in Antarctica. But here’s what that work has inspired: one swell documentary.
  20. As it turns out, modes of farce and fantasy enable Mr. Dumont to pull the rug out from under the viewer in a number of new and upsetting ways. Be prepared.
  21. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki deepens quietly. This is Mr. Kuosmanen’s first feature (he has directed a few shorts), and if he had any rookie jitters you wouldn’t know it.
  22. Here, both the director (Denise Di Novi) and the writer (Christina Hodson) are women, yet that doesn’t translate into a reimagining of the tired formula.
  23. Free Fire is an action movie finely tuned to even the most potentially vicious audiences’ tolerances. It is filled with mayhem, but avoids grisly violence — at least until the finale pulls out some gory, and not inapt, punch lines. Luxuriating in disreputability in all the right ways, the film also contains no shortage of profane verbal wit.
  24. Weighed down by the worthiness of its intentions, The Promise is a big, barren wartime romance that approaches the Armenian genocide with too much calculation and not nearly enough heat.
  25. It’s refreshing to see concrete solutions at work, many of them at the grass-roots level. And the optimism of those countering ineffective politicians and big business is infectious.
  26. Throughout, the solitary Mr. Tower maintains an unflappable refinement, dedicated, a college friend says, to “looking for some utopian possibility of living, because that’s what kept the darkness away.”
  27. Only intermittently stimulating.
  28. The narrative, read by John Krasinski, is kid-friendly in a cloying sort of way, and unpleasant realities like China’s pollution are not mentioned. So as an introduction for children to exotic creatures in picturesque landscapes, the movie is harmless enough.
  29. By the Time It Gets Dark has clearly been thought through, but it’s so cryptic that it cries out for, if not perfect explanations, perhaps footnotes. It’s so conceptual that it offers little for those not in sync.

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