The New York Times' Scores

For 20,269 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:
20269 movie reviews
  1. The result is an American masterpiece, independent to the bone.
  2. On one hand, this is just cinema. On the other, there’s something about the way that the editing keeps time with the music, the way the talking is enhancing what’s onstage rather than upstaging it. In many of these passages, facts, gyration, jive and comedy are cut across one another yet in equilibrium. So, yeah: cinema, obviously. But also something that feels rarer: syncopation.
  3. A pretty kettle of bubbling brew it makes under Mr. Lubitsch's deft and tender management and with a genial company to play it gently, well this side of farce and well that side of utter seriousness.
  4. Say this, in sum, for "Breathless": it is certainly no cliché, in any area or sense of the word. It is more a chunk of raw drama, graphically and artfully torn with appropriately ragged edges out of the tough underbelly of modern metropolitan life.
  5. The genius of 12 Years a Slave is its insistence on banal evil, and on terror, that seeped into souls, bound bodies and reaped an enduring, terrible price.
  6. Mr. Affleck, in one of the most fiercely disciplined screen performances in recent memory, conveys both Lee’s inner avalanche of feeling and the numb decorum that holds it back.
  7. A couple of sequences in the middle of the movie just mark time, but usually everything works, to make Nashville the most original, provocative high‐spirited film Mr. Altman has yet given.
  8. Even despite a big let-down, which fortunately comes near the end, it stands sixteen hands above the level of routine horse opera these days.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Miss Farrow is quite marvelous, pale, suffering, almost constantly on-screen in a difficult role that requires her to be learning for almost two hours what the audience has guessed from the start...Everyone else is fine, but the movie—although it is pleasant—doesn't quite work on any of its dark or powerful terms.
  9. 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.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Its impulses, which are profound but not transcendental, follow an esthetic program that is also a moral progression, and that emerges, with superb lucidity, only from the greatest art.
  10. A nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised.
  11. In the vast library where the celluloid literature of the screen is stored there is one small, uncrowded shelf devoted to the cinema's masterworks, to those films which by dignity of theme and excellence of treatment seem to be of enduring artistry, seem destined to be recalled not merely at the end of their particular year but whenever great motion pictures are mentioned. To that shelf of screen classics Twentieth Century-Fox yesterday added its version of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
  12. 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!
  13. M. Carne has created a frequently captivating film which has moments of great beauty in it and some performances of exquisite note.
  14. 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.
  15. With The Lady Eve, which arrived yesterday at the Paramount, Mr. Sturges is indisputably established as one of the top one or two writers and directors of comedy working in Hollywood today. A more charming or distinguished gem of nonsense has not occurred since It Happened One Night.
  16. For all of Mr. Cuarón’s formal wizardry and pictorial grandeur, he is a humanist at heart.
  17. Fantasia is simply terrific—as terrific as anything that has ever happened on a screen.
  18. With Beauty and the Beast, a tender, seamless and even more ambitious film than its predecessor, Disney has done something no one has done before: combine the latest computer animation techniques with the best of Broadway.
  19. Electric and alive as few films are, Lovers Rock will make you giddy with longing for a pleasure we’ve been too long denied: The singular rush of being one with a beat and a roomful of possibilities.
  20. Another astonishing chapter in the career of the Monster.
  21. It goes beyond the impartiality of journalism. It has the manner of an official report on the spiritual state of a civilization for which there is no hope.
  22. A fragile soap bubble of a horror film. It has a shiny surface that reflects all sorts of colors and moods, but after watching it for a while, you realize you're looking not into it, but through it and out the other side. The bubble doesn't burst, it slowly collapses, and you may feel, as I did, that you've been had.Not only do you probably have better things to do, but so, I'm sure, do most of the people connected with the film.
  23. Showcasing the best and the worst in human nature, Orlando von Einsiedel’s devastating documentary “Virunga” wrenches a startlingly lucid narrative from a sickening web of bribery, corruption and violence.
  24. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is an exciting, goofy and deadly serious big-screen no — a no to complacency, to oppression, to tyranny. It’s a carnivalesque epic about good and evil, violence and power, inalienable rights and the fight against injustice; it’s also a love story.
  25. There have been few sharper portraits of the film maker as alchemist than Hearts of Darkness: A Film Maker's Apocalypse, in which Francis Ford Coppola is seen struggling with hellish logistical problems, wild-card actors, freak accidents and other unseen demons, then ultimately pulling a miracle out of his hat.
  26. When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark's face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it's a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.
  27. All things considered, it is the brilliance of Miss Hepburn as the Cockney waif who is transformed by Prof. Henry Higgins into an elegant female facade that gives an extra touch of subtle magic and individuality to the film.
  28. This is less a chronicle of forbidden desire than an examination of how desire works. Like a lost work of 18th-century literature, it is at once ardent and rigorous, passionate and philosophical.

Top Trailers