The New York Times' Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 9,400 out of 20312
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20312
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20312
20312 movie reviews
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  1. Mr. Donkey
    Zhou Shen and Liu Lu’s bleak farce Mr. Donkey, adapted from their play, has a sentimental streak, and, as farce can, a tendency to overheat. But beneath its mild staginess and intermittent mania lies a cynical, piercing parable about China’s past and perhaps its present.
  2. Thank You for Your Service
    Thank You for Your Service, directed by Tom Donahue, uses its late scenes to explore nongovernment programs that have arisen to help veterans. Those examples are heartfelt and encouraging, and offer some hope after the devastating early sections.
  3. The Unspoken
    Some of the frights work reasonably well; and Ms. Ferland is convincing. But there aren’t enough surprises or innovations to make this one stand out in the sea of horror fare that comes along this time of year.
  4. Finding Babel
    In what probably qualifies as both an accomplishment and a shortcoming, the movie makes you want to read Babel’s writing instead.
  5. Crosscurrent
    Cramming fantasy and mysticism, faith and history into a single riverboat journey, this dirgelike meditation on China’s painful economic rebirth dispenses with narrative in favor of semiotics.
  6. A Billion Lives
    It’s a net broadly cast and woven of implications rather than of indisputable evidence, but — especially given the tobacco industry’s credibility problems — you’ll probably be inclined to think there’s some truth to the film’s allegations.
  7. Into the Inferno
    It’s an exhilarating trip, filled with strange stories, fascinating rituals and ethereally beautiful images of bubbling magma and flowing lava, some of which were captured using drones.
  8. Gimme Danger
    Gimme Danger is still plenty entertaining and includes many moments of foaming-at-the-mouth musical fury.
  9. By Sidney Lumet
    While it’s no surprise that Mr. Lumet can spin a tale, these murky-looking, less-than-flattering sit-downs are irritatingly suboptimal, particularly given that he was so great at telling intimate stories about men in shadows.
  10. Inferno
    Part of the draw of these movies is that they don’t create beauty, but instead borrow the emotions of the beauty they depict. (This, more or less, is one definition of kitsch, courtesy of the philosopher Tomas Kulka.) That makes the movies easy to watch and easy to forget.
  11. Portrait of a Garden
    The vision of nature being lovingly tended in Rosie Stapel’s documentary, Portrait of a Garden, is remarkably evocative.
  12. Oasis: Supersonic
    It may surprise people who’ve experienced the Gallaghers only in tabloid-fodder mode that “Supersonic” teems with stirring and even moving moments.
  13. Boo! A Madea Halloween
    The whole thing eventually devolves into the maelstrom of reactionary moralizing that is Mr. Perry’s specialty, not that any informed viewer would have reason to expect otherwise
  14. Fire at Sea
    Fire at Sea occupies your consciousness like a nightmare, and yet somehow you don’t want it to end.
  15. King Cobra
    To say it feels reasonably authentic doesn’t mean it’s very good. Mr. Kelly, who directed the well-received “I Am Michael,” starring Mr. Franco as a Christian pastor with a gay past, clearly knows the territory, but he barely skims the surface.
  16. A Stray
    The substantial pleasures of the movie are supplemented by the gratification of seeing an emerging talent with concerns far outside the conventional indie realm asserting himself with such authority.
  17. The Uncondemned
    Most extraordinary are interviews with the women who came forward to provide evidence in court. Their integrity and tenacity, and their loyalty to one another, is enough to bring you to tears.
  18. It Had to Be You
    Cristin Milioti (“How I Met Your Mother”) is so quirkily endearing in the lead role that she makes it easy to just go with the airy tale.
  19. The Whole Truth
    The Whole Truth plays like an especially claustrophobic courtroom procedural, drably photographed and generically framed.
  20. Before the Flood
    The film wants to spur individual changes in behavior, but there’s a fair amount in it that might discourage you from even trying.
  21. In a Valley of Violence
    Mr. West retains his signature restraint and slow-burn approach to brutality. Missing, however, is his typically skillful manipulation of tension, partly because his tone veers so often from jokey to reverential, from winking at the western to making a sacrament of it.
  22. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
    Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is the second movie that Tom Cruise has starred in as this title character. Let’s hope it’s the last.
  23. American Pastoral
    American Pastoral leaves a residue of dread and despair that is oddly in keeping with today’s moment of uncertainty amid an ugly presidential campaign.
  24. Creepy
    Creepy certainly works — looks and feels — like a horror movie, but it also has the conundrums of a detective story, the emotional currents of a domestic drama and the quickening pulse of a psychological thriller, a combination that creates a kind of destabilization.
  25. The Handmaiden
    A rebus, a romance, a gothic thriller and a woozy comedy, The Handmaiden is finally and most significantly a liberation story.
  26. 31
    Awash in blood and revoltingly misogynistic dialogue, this latest redneck ruckus (his seventh feature) is a grindhouse slog of unrelenting bad taste.
  27. Ouija: Origin of Evil
    The director, Mike Flanagan, who with Jeff Howard also wrote the script, demonstrates rare patience for horror fare as he builds toward the macabre.
  28. Keeping Up with the Joneses
    The absence of laughs can’t be blamed on a lack of talent.
  29. Moonlight
    Moonlight is both a disarmingly, at times almost unbearably personal film and an urgent social document, a hard look at American reality and a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces.
  30. Michael Moore in TrumpLand
    Mr. Moore has basically made an earnest but not very entertaining pro-Clinton campaign film, occasionally funny, momentarily heartfelt when he takes up the subject of universal health care and the lives lost for lack of it. Against the rest of his work (“Bowling for Columbine,” “Roger & Me”) it’s fairly tepid stuff.
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