The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,323 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: 9,408 out of 20323
  2. Mixed: 8,448 out of 20323
  3. Negative: 2,467 out of 20323
20323 movie reviews
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  1. Paths of the Soul
    The movie so upends the traditions of documentary and narrative filmmaking that “dramatizes” may be inaccurate — the filmmakers followed the real pilgrims for a full year, after all. But the movie is so well made and engaging that such distinctions will make little difference to the viewer.
  2. Kill Zone 2
    If there’s one rewarding thing about many Hong Kong action directors, it’s that they rarely dawdle in getting to what fight fans have come for: bracing shootouts and high-impact fisticuffs and footwork.
  3. I Am Wrath
    The script, besides being full of bad-guy clichés, doesn’t give the actors enough opportunities to work up a buddy rapport, though the glimmers of it that they are permitted are promising.
  4. Cash Only
    I must have breathed while watching Cash Only. But it sure felt as if I didn’t. This brutal and severe film has that effect.
  5. High-Rise
    The retro-futurist production design is gorgeously awful, the cast is awfully gorgeous, and the dystopian setting is explored with an appropriately Ballardian blend of suavity and aggression. But onscreen, High-Rise is curiously inert. The themes don’t resonate, and the story lags and lumbers.
  6. Last Days in the Desert
    Whether or not you accept the tenets of Christianity, Last Days in the Desert, Rodrigo García’s austere depiction of the temptations of Christ, offers a quietly compelling portrait of the human side of Jesus.
  7. Pelé: Birth of a Legend
    The film’s director of photography, Matthew Libatique, makes “Pelé” more than an eye-moistening anthem for a built-in global audience.
  8. What We Become
    What We Become is a very pretty movie with a very dark heart. The payoff is brutal, but earned.
  9. Love & Friendship
    At times, most often when Mr. Bennett is onscreen, Love & Friendship is howlingly funny, and as a whole it feels less like a romance than like a caper, an unabashedly contrived and effortlessly inventive heist movie with a pretty good payoff.
  10. Money Monster
    Money Monster begins with a jolt of satire, proceeds through a maze of beat-the-clock exposition and lands on a surprisingly gentle, sentimental note.
  11. Sunset Song
    Like most of Mr. Davies’s films, Sunset Song makes you see the world through his sorrowful eyes. He is a die-hard romantic, whose acute sensitivity to the passage of time conveys a bittersweet awareness of the fragility of beauty, which, for him, is synonymous with melancholy.
  12. The Lobster
    Cruelty and humor are nestled like spoons in a drawer. Mr. Lanthimos’s method is to elicit an appreciative chuckle followed by a gasp of shock, and to deliver violence and whimsy in the same even tone. “The Lobster” is often startlingly funny in the way it proposes its surreal conceits, and then upsettingly grim in the way it follows through on them.
  13. A Monster with a Thousand Heads
    A Monster With a Thousand Heads will make your blood boil.
  14. The Family Fang
    Mr. Bateman’s direction of the actors is especially sensitive in this and other tricky scenes, showing a delicacy with emotional textures that isn’t always matched by the story, especially when Annie and Baxter speak in therapeutic clichés.
  15. Bridgend
    Everything’s in service of the images in Bridgend, a stylishly shot, eerily scored and moodily acted film that wants for nothing but a plot. Depending on how you like your movies, this is either a walkout or a must-see.
  16. Those People
    The director, Joey Kuhn, making his feature debut from his own script, has created fairly credible and sympathetic characters, despite the 1-percenter milieu.
  17. Elstree 1976
    "Star Wars” fans will, of course, love this film, but it’s also a thought-provoking exploration of the dawning of our current age.
  18. Beautiful Something
    The movie is in dire need of character development and a wider social context.
  19. Phantom of the Theatre
    By the end, the accelerating plot twists and turns — love, obsession, family obligations, personal honor — become tangled and knotted; a few threads are simply ignored or discarded.
  20. Mothers and Daughters
    Mothers and Daughters is full of recognizable stars and heartfelt conversations. Unfortunately, it’s largely devoid of the kind of character development that can give such conversations real impact.
  21. Dheepan
    [Mr. Audiard] makes popcorn movies disguised as art films, and vice versa. Dheepan is a bit like a Liam Neeson revenge-dad action thriller directed by the Dardenne brothers. I mean that in the best possible way.
  22. Rabin in His Own Words
    The obvious problem with its subject-says-all approach is the lack of outside voices and perspective. This is a broad summation of the man, not a critical look at his policies.
  23. Being Charlie
    The movie’s refusal to abandon commercial formulas and examine its characters’ inner lives suggests that the director’s years inside the Hollywood bubble may have prevented him from recognizing the degree to which independent films and television are already overrun with deeper, more sensitive explorations of addiction and recovery.
  24. The Offering
    The Offering, a muddled horror film, falls over itself incorporating as many genre elements as possible. The result is the cinematic equivalent of combining every paint color on a canvas: a murky mess.
  25. Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
    Belladonna of Sadness is compulsively watchable, even at its most disturbing: The imagery is frequently graphic, and still, after over 40 years, it has the power to shock.
  26. Mad Tiger
    The movie is obviously heartfelt, but the directors, Jonathan Yi and Michael Haertlein, never turn this motley crew into compelling characters.
  27. Dark Horse
    Dark Horse is a canny package that uses the classic structure of the sports-underdog story to deliver a glowing ode to community pride and the merits of collective action over individual gain.
  28. Captain America: Civil War
    This very crowded, reasonably enjoyable installment in the Avengers cycle...reveals, even more than its predecessors, an essential truth about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s not so much a grand science-fiction saga, or even a series of action-adventure movies, as a very expensive, perpetually renewed workplace sitcom.
  29. Sin Alas
    Mr. Chace does his finest work with Mr. Padrón, and together director and actor create a portrayal of a man who, even as he’s stirred to action, seems increasingly burdened by his sentimental education.
  30. A Bigger Splash
    The world that Mr. Guadagnino creates is at once seductive and aspirational, and another reminder that movies have always excelled at stoking consumer desires.
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