The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,324 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 20324
  2. Mixed: 8,449 out of 20324
  3. Negative: 2,467 out of 20324
20324 movie reviews
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  1. The Salvation
    This is, it’s worth remembering, a movie set in the American West that was shot in South Africa by a Danish director with a Danish star. In other words it’s another dream of America, feverish, lovely and absurd.
  2. '71
    Mr. Demange makes his feature directing debut with ’71, but he already knows how to move bodies through space and the complex choreography that he’s worked out in this movie is a thing of joy.
  3. Maps to the Stars
    It takes a perverse effort of will to love “Maps to the Stars.” It’s a little too chilly, and in some places too easy. But you may find yourself drawn back to it, and retracing its route from the familiar to the uncanny, from entertainment to revulsion, from dream to nightmare.
  4. The Lazarus Effect
    Despite eclectic casting and occasional experiments with objective camera, the director, David Gelb (“Jiro Dreams of Sushi”), can’t breathe similar life into this risible mix of pseudoscientific hokum and supernatural freakouts.
  5. The Hunting Ground
    What cuts through the filmmaking clutter are the young women and men who share their accounts of abuse by both their attackers and their schools.
  6. Farewell to Hollywood
    Farewell to Hollywood is moving yet queasily unsettling, even if Ms. Nicholson’s enthusiasm mitigates the veneer of exploitation. Watching it feels like judging a last will and testament. The movie is an intimate dialogue from which viewers may prefer to recuse themselves.
  7. Wild Canaries
    Mr. Levine spins a caper that wins you over more through tenacity than through originality.
  8. Kung Fu Elliot
    Watching Elliot and his fellows stumble determinedly through shoots, pleasantly delusional about the movie’s prospects, is mildly amusing, a testament to indie film’s appeal for a certain hardy strain of dreamer. But the joke sours, and the documentary, filmed over two years, turns darker.
  9. The DUFF
    Even in this would-be subversive comedy. Success means getting the guy. Getting good grades (as Bianca does) is not enough, nor is writing the front-page article in the school paper.
  10. Wild Tales
    Mr. Szifron creates inhabited worlds with comic timing and visual flair, but you can hear him chortling as he shovels his people into the grinder.
  11. Approaching the Elephant
    Ms. Wilder, in her debut feature, riskily opts to leave much of the children’s educational activity fairly vague. Which gives it one more thing in common with school: You need to pay attention.
  12. All the Wilderness
    Mr. Johnson doesn’t give fateful weight to the breadcrumbs that guide James forward. Glancing encounters and faltering conversations unfold lightly and with a visual seductiveness that the cinematographer, Adam Newport-Berra, crescendos in the film’s drifting, transformative middle section.
  13. McFarland USA
    Aims to be rousing rather than revelatory, and it mostly succeeds.
  14. Hot Tub Time Machine 2
    Whether something did or didn’t happen, and the comic confusion as the future bumps into the past: those are the smart parts of a movie that is not as idiotic as it pretends to be.
  15. Queen and Country
    Queen and Country doesn’t quite have the bittersweet intensity of its precursor. The terrible magic of the war is missing, and so is the heightened, wide-eyed perceptiveness of the child protagonist.
  16. Coast of Death
    The director’s wide frame encompasses vast terrain from a middle vantage point, achieving views and noticing changes over time that a mere passer-by might not.
  17. Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
    Ambulant corpses may be tramping all over our movie and television screens these days, but Wyrmwood has enough novelty — and more than enough energy — to best its minuscule budget.
  18. Hits
    The gloriously scabrous ending to it all leaves the viewer wishing this talented writer had let it rip earlier.
  19. The Last Five Years
    In Mr. Jordan’s portrayal of Jamie, this handsome talented musical theater performer (“Newsies”) goes for the jugular in taking down his character and making him insufferable.
  20. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    With her dramatically pale face framed by a voluptuous dark cloud of hair, Ms. Elkabetz is never more effective than when she’s holding still, her face so drained of emotion that it transforms into a screen within the screen on which another, indelibly private movie is playing.
  21. White Rabbit
    While White Rabbit is not a lost cause, its difficult story of mistreatment and lashing out proves too much of a challenge to tell well.
  22. What We Do in the Shadows
    This weird and witty spoof filters the routines of the living through the lens of the long dead.
  23. The Rewrite
    That Mr. Grant can bring Keith back from the edge more or less persuasively is a testament to his ability to convey genuine humility without mawkishness, once he sees the light.
  24. Kingsman: The Secret Service
    The problem is that Mr. Vaughn has no interest in, or perhaps understanding of, violence as a cinematic tool. He doesn’t use violence; he squanders it.
  25. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    It’s not especially horrifying, or even very thought-provoking. It is touching, however, because it represents one frequently misunderstood, intermittently great filmmaker’s tribute to another.
  26. Fifty Shades of Grey
    Fifty Shades of Grey might not be a good movie — O.K., it’s a terrible movie — but it might nonetheless be a movie that feels good to see, whether you squirm or giggle or roll your eyes or just sit still and take your punishment.
  27. Boy Meets Girl
    Placing sex and gender identity at the center of almost every conversation, the writer and director, Eric Schaeffer, is so keen to demythologize that the film’s potentially most affecting moments are too often smothered by the hackneyed characters and setups that surround them.
  28. The Other Man: F.W. de Klerk and the End of Apartheid
    None of this is particularly cinematic (he relies much too heavily on title cards to fill in historical blanks), but it is engaging, mainly because the stakes were so high and the statesmanship so delicate.
  29. Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine
    In lingering over moody night streets and trembling faces, Ms. Josue has brought this film to the verge of becoming a tear-jerker. But, as epitomized in an extraordinary scene with a conflicted priest, it’s all part of a shared soul-searching that still continues.
  30. 1971
    Ms. Hamilton’s straightforward documentary skillfully interweaves reminiscences by members of the group with re-enactments of the burglary.
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