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. Big Eyes
    Trying to do Margaret justice, Mr. Burton can’t prevent himself (and Mr. Waltz) from upstaging her.
  2. American Sniper
    Less a war movie than a western — the story of a lone gunslinger facing down his nemesis in a dusty, lawless place — it is blunt and effective, though also troubling.
  3. The Gambler
    Mr. Wyatt’s direction is smooth, although he’s more confident, and the movie more convincing, when he goes for baroque with the story’s excesses.
  4. Leviathan
    The director, Andrey Zvyagintsev, has a heavenly eye but a leaden hand, and his movie is as heavy as it is transporting, filled with stirring shots of the natural world and deep dives into a human realm flooded with tears and vodka.
  5. Into the Woods
    Into the Woods, the splendid Disney screen adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical, infuses new vitality into the tired marketing concept of entertainment for “children of all ages.” That usually translates to mean only children and their doting parents. But with Into the Woods, you grow up with the characters, young and old, in a lifelong process of self-discovery.
  6. Unbroken
    What the movie ends up in desperate need of is a sense of life made real and palpable through dreadful, transporting details, not a life embalmed in hagiographic awe.
  7. Selma
    Even if you think you know what’s coming, Selma hums with suspense and surprise. Packed with incident and overflowing with fascinating characters, it is a triumph of efficient, emphatic cinematic storytelling. And much more than that, of course.
  8. Two Days, One Night
    Her shoulders slumped, her eyes weary, her gait heavy, Ms. Cotillard moves past naturalism into something impossible to doubt and hard to describe. Sandra is an ordinary person in mundane circumstances, but her story, plainly and deliberately told, is suspenseful, sobering and, in the original, fear-of-God sense of the word, tremendous.
  9. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb
    It’s a chronically underachieving movie, but relatively amusing in its quaint wish fulfillment.
  10. Winter Sleep
    Mr. Ceylan performs this particular operation with rigorous solemnity, technical virtuosity and precision tools — his lapidary visual style rises to the challenge of the natural environment — yet there’s something missing from the very start, namely the spark of breathed-in life.
  11. Song of the Sea
    Song of the Sea moves delicately but purposefully from pain to contentment and from anger to love. On land and underwater, the siblings’ adventures unfold in hand-drawn, painterly frames of misty pastels, sometimes encircled by cobwebby borders that give them the look of pictures in a locket.
  12. A Small Section of the World
    It’s like a gently distressed company film blown up to feature length.
  13. Life of an Actress: The Musical
    Unfortunately, poor execution prevents the movie from achieving an authentic throwback feel. Although the principal cast members are Broadway veterans, here they struggle with technological and tonal issues.
  14. Inside the Mind of Leonardo
    The movie starts by noting Leonardo’s intent to leave a memory of himself in the minds of others. That’s a benchmark Inside the Mind of Leonardo won’t meet.
  15. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation
    Employing bursts of Bach and English-language narration, this lulling, informative documentary never fully grapples with its topic’s complexity.
  16. Annie
    The cast would have been better served by a middle school production overseen by a creatively frustrated, inappropriately ambitious drama teacher than by this hacky, borderline-incompetent production, which was directed by Will Gluck from a screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna.
  17. Mr. Turner
    Mr. Turner is a mighty work of critical imagination, a loving, unsentimental portrait of a rare creative soul. But even as it celebrates a glorious painter and illuminates the sources of his pictures with startling clarity and insight, the movie patiently and thoroughly demolishes more than a century’s worth of mythology about what art is and how artists work.
  18. If You Don't, I Will
    If You Don’t, I Will is a dour, acutely observed comedy about marital boredom that doesn’t glamorize or overdramatize the characters’ angst. Its lived-in performances evoke an excruciating stalemate that can be ended only by a radical break.
  19. Goodbye to All That
    Goodbye to All That is very evenhanded in assessing its characters’ flaws, and it never sentimentalizes.
  20. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    Bilbo may fully learn a sense of friendship and duty, and have quite a story to tell, but somewhere along the way, Mr. Jackson loses much of the magic.
  21. We Are the Giant
    We Are the Giant builds up quite a rhetorical head of steam, but it doesn’t try to analyze the conflicts it observes or to fill in the history, except in the broadest sense of placing these uprisings on a list of rebellions that stretch back through millenniums.
  22. Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks
    It’s a cornball odd-couple comedy: Prim older woman meets a brassy young gay man. Still, it’s extraordinary just watching the peerless Ms. Rowlands wring the most out of the repartee in this adaptation of a play by Richard Alfieri.
  23. Skating to New York
    No role is sketched out beyond brush strokes, and no relationship is meaningfully examined.
  24. Tip Top
    The humor of this situation — or of any of the movie’s strained wackiness — doesn’t particularly translate. It also does little to illuminate the more serious commentary on immigration, the legacy of colonialism and the tensions within the country’s Algerian communities.
  25. A Little Game
    Cartoonish in its depiction of class disparities, A Little Game gains some subtlety from its performers: Mr. Abraham, an old pro, does fine work alongside Ms. Ballard, a newcomer.
  26. Little Feet
    Rising above a minuscule budget with ladles of charm and a tender poignancy, Little Feet is a quixotic poem to youthful resourcefulness.
  27. Maidan
    Maidan is a film of scale and immediacy, finding artistry, for better or worse, in bearing witness.
  28. Free the Nipple
    The logistics of raising money and securing permits for the cause are not the most compelling or irreverent subject. The movie’s goal is straightforward advocacy.
  29. Isn't It Delicious
    The film’s tone becomes mawkish, akin to a Lifetime movie that flaunts a little bite before it wallows in melodrama. All wit is vanquished by it, as well as by the slow pace and cheap bits.
  30. Expelled
    The tech-gadget-heavy plotting is so preposterously weak that it’s hard to look past the cheap laughs or half-baked direction.
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