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. Partisan
    The screenwriters, Ariel Kleiman (who is also the director) and Sarah Cyngler, have cut their story loose from any real significance, leaving us with Gregori, who has no discernible political views and no unifying beliefs, even delusional ones.
  2. Northern Soul
    Funny and feisty, gritty and sometimes grim, this first feature from the photographer Elaine Constantine delivers a sweaty snapshot of a very specific time and place.
  3. Sherpa
    An exceptionally absorbing documentary.
  4. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    Like Mr. Panahi’s cab, his film is equipped with both windows and mirrors. It’s reflective and revealing, intimate and wide-ranging, compact and moving.
  5. Shout Gladi Gladi
    [A] thorough, powerfully straightforward documentary.
  6. Shanghai
    The spectacular international cast... bring a lot of life to the movie’s uncooperative story material.
  7. The Martian
    Mr. Damon’s Everyman quality (he’s our Jimmy Stewart) helps scale the story down, but what makes this epic personal is Mr. Scott’s filmmaking, in which every soaring aerial shot of the red planet is answered by the intimate landscape of a face.
  8. The Creeping Garden
    Throughout, the filmmakers achieve the rare documentary feat of delving into a topic from multiple angles without slathering it in adulation.
  9. Labyrinth of Lies
    It is content to be a chilly, disquieting study of a society in a state of denial until the truth is bared.
  10. The Walk
    Almost magically, The Walk transforms itself into a beguiling caper movie, full of comic energy and nimble ingenuity.
  11. Sleepless in New York
    There’s something woebegone about the film itself as it staggers along, ever in danger of tipping into the abyss inhabited by one of its subjects.
  12. Becoming Bulletproof
    While the scenes shown from “Bulletproof,” the western they complete, are haphazard, that’s of little concern. If you want to see real courage, it’s not in that movie anyway. It’s in this documentary.
  13. Western
    With its evocative landscapes and its non-narrative, cinéma vérité style, Western is a layered, atmospheric chronicle of living traditions like bullfights and rodeos, mariachi bands and Texas two-steps. Yet the film also records the tremors of change.
  14. Wildlike
    The Wildlike landscapes are exhilarating, but when the film works, it’s because of the interiors.
  15. Lost in Hong Kong
    Perhaps because it tries too hard to be too many things, the movie loses its punch.
  16. Misunderstood
    A buoyantly funny, sometimes desperately sad film.
  17. The Keeping Room
    Mr. Barber can work up a fair sense of menace, but he seems to have directed most of the talented cast to speak their lines in a mannered fashion learned from other movies.
  18. Ashby
    Ashby is a movie divided against itself. It’s a comedy afraid of being too funny lest its macho sentimentality seem even more ridiculous than it is, and a drama afraid of appearing too serious lest you dismiss it as hogwash.
  19. Pay the Ghost
    Dan Kay’s filament-thin story, accessorized with flapping vultures and disturbing graffiti, relies entirely on Mr. Cage’s desperate-dad energy.
  20. The Green Inferno
    The film reawakens long-repudiated notions of white supremacy and such, but Mr. Roth is surely not trying to peddle them. He’s merely seeing if he can replicate the formula of the subgenre. And he does, fairly slickly, in fact.
  21. Hotel Transylvania 2
    Some jokes actually work (a GPS-voice gag induced unforced laughter), and the whole thing is amiable and colorful and surprisingly low on body-function gags. It may not kill you to take your kids.
  22. A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story
    The makers of A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story leave a few too many questions unanswered, but their subject’s immense optimism steamrolls through the documentary’s shortcomings. Indeed, there seems to be little this woman can’t vanquish.
  23. Finders Keepers
    Revealing its humanity slowly and a little tardily, Finders Keepers finally does justice to its dueling antiheroes.
  24. Mission to Lars
    Documentaries about disabilities don’t come any smarter or more touching than Mission to Lars, a beautiful sibling road trip tale with a heavy-metal flourish.
  25. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    Focusing on the magazine and not its offshoots, the film is uproarious, not for what its many talking heads say but for its astonishing procession of brilliant, boundary-breaching illustrations and captions (augmented by some animation), many of which are as explosively funny today as they were when first published.
  26. Mississippi Grind
    Mississippi Grind itself may be a bit of a throwback to the lived-in, character-driven, landscape-besotted films of the 1970s, but it’s less a pastiche or a homage than the cinematic equivalent of a classic song, expertly covered.
  27. Stonewall
    The feisty, lovelorn Ray is far and away the strongest, most complex character, and Mr. Beauchamp gives him his due, even though too many of his speeches sound like a mix of biographical filler and boilerplate sloganeering.
  28. 99 Homes
    If 99 Homes is a scolding look at a society gone astray, it is also a minor masterpiece of suspense, as tightly wound as “Sicario,” Denis Villeneuve’s white-knuckle drug-war thriller, and almost as brutal.
  29. The Intern
    Mr. De Niro owns the movie from the moment he opens his mouth, and is staring into the camera and right at you.
  30. Office
    The songs in Office aren’t especially memorable. But it’s hard to care too much when you have a director who knows how to create tension by moving the camera and characters even while he’s delivering a nimble political softshoe with filmmaking dazzle.
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