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 Liberator
    Perhaps most impressive are the resources deployed in shooting this production. As if the film’s ostentatious aerial vistas, merely functional scene-writing and score weren’t distracting enough, Mr. Sexton’s dialogue freezes dead any simulation of the period with tone-deaf lines amid Bolívar’s impassioned rhetoric.
  2. The Supreme Price
    Joanna Lipper’s documentary shapes one country’s recent history into an accessible and tragic family drama.
  3. The Good Lie
    For all its softening, The Good Lie, like “Monsieur Lazhar,” has a core of decency, humanity and good will that feels authentic. You won’t curse yourself for occasionally tearing up.
  4. The Culture High
    Some of this seems like stoner’s paranoia, and some of the film’s talking heads, mainly comedians, don’t make the best advocates. Over all, though, its experts... argue forcefully for decriminalization.
  5. Annabelle
    Annabelle is less cluttered with creepy bric-a-brac than “The Conjuring.” (The original director, James Wan, produced here.) But Mr. Leonetti embraces the potential of negative space.
  6. Left Behind
    The director, Vic Armstrong — whose lengthy résumé hews primarily toward stunt work — displays no facility with actors and even less with pacing.
  7. Nas: Time Is Illmatic
    Despite some conventional moves here and there and a weakness for the cult of genius, the documentary sustains that uneasy mood cast by Nas’s expression as a child on the “Illmatic” cover, sobered by experience and wisdom before his time.
  8. The Decent One
    The voice-over-driven readings and the illustrative footage — unwisely augmented with new sound effects — lack a fundamental filmic momentum.
  9. Men, Women & Children
    Veering between alarmism and cautious reassurance — between technohysteria and shrugging, nothing-new-under-the-sun resignation — Men, Women & Children succumbs to the confusion it tries to illuminate.
  10. It Was You Charlie
    The film is at once overly eccentric and underdeveloped. It starts as an exercise in bleak absurdism and ends as a Frank Capra Christmas special, with little originality in between.
  11. This Ain't No Mouse Music
    It’s Arhoolie’s musicians — Big Mama Thornton, Flaco Jiménez, Michael Doucet of the Cajun band BeauSoleil and others — who are the true stars. I dare you not to tap your feet.
  12. Advanced Style
    Advanced Style is undeniably captivating, even uplifting at times. But Mr. Cohen and Lina Plioplyte, the director, present a disconcerting mixed message.
  13. Print the Legend
    The movie’s biggest entertainment, however, is not the market-share rivalry between MakerBot Industries, in Brooklyn, and the younger Formlabs, in Boston, but its fearless dive into dweeb-culture head space.
  14. Harlem Street Singer
    A labor of love and respect.
  15. Hellaware
    The old story of art as a refuge for scoundrels and callow youth is amusing and updated with assorted details.
  16. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    Mr. Ridley’s ambitions and refusal to treat Hendrix as a solvable mystery are welcome, given how often biopics re-embalm their subjects. Here, a legend is born, and a man too.
  17. Believe Me
    The film’s congeniality, however, in no way dulls its humor or the sharpness of its observations.
  18. Pride
    It is the kind of hearty, blunt-force drama with softened edges that leaves audiences applauding and teary-eyed.
  19. The Boxtrolls
    While The Boxtrolls does follow kiddie-action genre conventions in its big, noisy climax — a hectic brawl of explosions, collisions and oversize machines — it also finds an impressive number of quiet, eccentric and haunting moments along the way.
  20. The Equalizer
    Mr. Fuqua, while not the world’s most subtle filmmaker, directs the action sequences with bluntness and clarity and effectively uses his star as an oasis of calm in a jumpy, nasty universe.
  21. The Two Faces of January
    There’s a mystery here, some thrills and blood, but mostly there are beautiful people and the kind of human hunger that devours everything and everyone in sight.
  22. Asmodexia
    If the twisty finale underwhelms, Mr. Carreté’s enigmatic style and textured images offer their own doomy rewards.
  23. The Little Bedroom
    The Little Bedroom is a gentle, melancholy drama so pale and tentative that its very colors appear washed away by grief.
  24. Not Cool
    A raunchy comedy that is so poorly executed and so unfunny that no one involved with it should ever be allowed to work in the movies again.
  25. Björk: Biophilia Live
    As skillful an orchestrator as Björk is, her crescendos and tightly designed wilderness can lose their strength with repetition. But she and her collaborators do make a pretty singing picture with their chosen audiovisual tool set.
  26. Lilting
    For much of the movie, Junn is a one-dimensional grump who pulls this schematic if unfocused movie down with each frown and harrumph.
  27. Two Night Stand
    It’s hard not to root for this couple — and, more to the point, these actors — to get together again.
  28. The Song
    The actors, none of whom have much experience, are quite convincing, but the story — Jed falls, then sees the error of his ways — is an oft-told one.
  29. Plastic
    It’s hard to escape the sense that Plastic is itself a cheap knockoff, but the point is not to look too closely.
  30. Gone Girl
    At its strongest, Gone Girl plays like a queasily, at times gleefully, funny horror movie about a modern marriage, one that has disintegrated partly because of spiraling downward mobility and lost privilege. Yet, as sometimes happens in Mr. Fincher’s work, dread descends like winter shadows, darkening the movie’s tone and visuals until it’s snuffed out all the light, air and nuance.
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