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. Calvary
    The limitations of Calvary are summed up by the insistent, dialectical chatter that almost mechanically pings and pongs between lightness and darkness, glibness and seriousness, insincerity and honesty, faithfulness and despair.
  2. Get On Up
    Like its gyrating, spasmodic staccato beats, Get On Up refuses to stand still. It whirls and does splits and jumps, with leaps around in time and changes in tempo that are jarring and abrupt and that usually feel just right.
  3. Guardians of the Galaxy
    Here, a pulse, wit, beauty and a real sensibility have been slipped into the fray, alongside the clockwork guffaws, kabooms and splats.
  4. Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania
    The film is earnest, formulaic and sentimental. But, like Humpty, it has enough charm to wear down defenses.
  5. Drunktown's Finest
    The screenplay tracing the characters’ struggles has a tidy, workshopped feel, and the dialogue and acting can be gratingly flat. But what gives the film a certain confidence is its cultural specificity and the fresh clashes and contrasts it presents.
  6. Bobby Jasoos
    The exuberant staging and Ms. Balan’s sly performance are the show here.
  7. War Story
    Aiming for a moody portrait of psychological distress, Mark Jackson directs with a sluggish pace, an abstract style and a dismal aesthetic that rebuff involvement.
  8. The Killer Inside Me
    Michael Winterbottom’s nasty and uneven adaptation of Jim Thompson’s surpassingly mean little crime novel.
  9. The Fluffy Movie
    Bringing out truths about fatherhood, love and pride without dissolving into crowd-pleasing, that material feels like the genuine article. Fluffy, not fluff.
  10. Hercules
    As the plot clogs up with foreseeable reversals, wisecrack duties go to Mr. McShane, whose oracular character keeps wrongly predicting his own death. Like Hercules, the movie is plagued by a split identity: It’s half-slog, half-Mel Brooks.
  11. Come Back to Me
    Come Back to Me has seamier goals, employing a quasi-religious conceit to justify its shocks of gore and sexual assault. In that regard, at least, it is grotesquely predictable.
  12. Under the Electric Sky
    This glossy movie from Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz about the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas feels the burden of promotional urges and lacks a sense of immersion in a multistage event attended by hundreds of thousands.
  13. Very Good Girls
    You can only imagine how much stronger the movie might have been had it fleshed out subsidiary dramas whose outlines are barely discernible.
  14. Beneath
    Sparing with scares and judicious with gore, the director, Ben Ketai (working from a screenplay by Patrick J. Doody and Chris Valenziano), proves better at summoning atmosphere than developing characters.
  15. The Kill Team
    Mr. Krauss might have served his material better if he had pulled the curtain back in The Kill Team, if only to explain why a movie that initially seems to be about one thing — as its shocker title suggests — is a partisan portrait of Specialist Winfield and his family.
  16. And So It Goes
    Relatable doesn’t have to mean routine, but Mr. Reiner doesn’t always bother to tell the difference.
  17. Lucy
    Buoyed by Ms. Johansson’s presence, Mr. Besson keeps his entertainment machine purring. He may be a hack, but he’s also a reliable entertainer.
  18. A Most Wanted Man
    Mr. Hoffman’s performance is so finely etched — and the story so irresistible — that the film becomes, almost inescapably, something of a last testament.
  19. Magic in the Moonlight
    Magic in the Moonlight is less a movie than the dutiful recitation of themes and plot points conducted by a squad of costumed actors. The tidy narrative may advance with clockwork precision, but the clock’s most prominent feature is the snooze button.
  20. A Letter to Momo
    Enveloped in a sweetness that buffers the depths of its emotions, Hiroyuki Okiura’s A Letter to Momo explores the stains of loss and regret on a personality too young to articulate them.
  21. A Master Builder
    As both an actor and a playwright, Wallace Shawn, at his most audacious, goes for the jugular, but in sneaky roundabout ways.
  22. Video Games: The Movie
    Unfocused and repetitive, this feature-length commercial by Jeremy Snead uses a muddled timeline and bargain basement graphics to produce a horn-tooting, “Aren’t games awesome?” tone.
  23. Persecuted
    This terrible attempt at a political thriller for the religious right is aimed not at Christians in general but at a certain breed of them, the kind who feel as if the rest of the world were engaged in a giant conspiracy against their interpretation of good and truth.
  24. K Missing Kings
    Despite a generous attempt at a series recap, it’s chaotic for the uninitiated. These characters require several episodes of exposure for us to feel that much is at stake in the ebb and flow of honor, hysteria and eternal friendship. In any case, the animation is often a pure sensual delight.
  25. Fanny
    Mr. Auteuil’s passion project is sincere but not successful, honorable but not alive.
  26. Alive Inside
    Neither the value of music nor the deficiencies of certain nursing homes are tough to debate. But a documentary that never leaves any doubt about what comes next, while single-mindedly stumping for a cause presented as unique, is also not terribly interesting as a film.
  27. A Five Star Life
    Narratively and emotionally, this weirdly becalmed trifle by Maria Sole Tognazzi ends up almost exactly where it started.
  28. Aftermath
    Essentially, we’re watching dead people refuse to lie down, yet the acting isn’t terrible, and Scott Winig’s photography is satisfyingly bleak and grimy.
  29. Planes: Fire & Rescue
    In 3-D, the firefighting scenes are visually striking — with plumes of smoke and chemical dust — though the backgrounds, like other aspects of the film, lack dimension.
  30. Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater
    The graceful flow avoids the spoon-feeding of pocket biographies, and even if the material can feel lean at times, Mr. Klinger shepherds along a valuable encounter with a sense of easy, generally uncanned observation.
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