The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,335 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: 9,412 out of 20335
  2. Mixed: 8,455 out of 20335
  3. Negative: 2,468 out of 20335
20335 movie reviews
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  1. From Where They Stood
    His film can feel overly cerebral—a bit like being plunged into a seminar—and the text cards do a lot of explanatory heavy lifting. But Cognet’s forensic approach does insist on memorializing these events in an important, physically specific way and, intentionally or not, queasily anticipates a world without any living eyewitnesses to these horrors.
  2. The Reverend
    Canfield’s debut feature is infused with its own measure of that gentling spirit. It is also blessedly low on piousness.
  3. Skies of Lebanon
    The movie’s openheartedness eventually wins the day.
  4. Pearl
    There is some sex and plenty of gore, but mostly an atmosphere of feverish, lurid melodrama leavened with winks of knowing humor and held together by Goth’s utterly earnest and wondrously bizarre performance.
  5. The Swimmers
    The Swimmers tells this story as an inspirational (but rarely sugarcoated) crowd-pleaser. Within those terms, it hits its marks.
  6. Extreme Measures
    Brisk and unsettling.
  7. A Balance
    Takiuchi’s Yuko, in turns motherly and mercenary, is bewitchingly enigmatic: What drives her? Why does she still live with her father? Mercifully, we receive little back story; it’s enough that she is an ambitious woman, choked by ruthless double standards surrounding sex and autonomy.
  8. Emergency Declaration
    Emergency Declaration, a piercing thriller from the South Korean writer-director Han Jae-rim, manages to deliver excitement and melodrama out of a ludicrous story line.
  9. The Ghost and the Darkness
    The Ghost and the Darkness, a lion-hunting story set in 19th-century Africa, is the rare Hollywood action-adventure that becomes more surprising and exotic as it moves along. While it begins on an unpromisingly starchy note, the film soon picks up speed, color and nicely nonchalant humor as it tells a true story about near-mythic beasts.
  10. True Believer
    The film's view of Eddie Dodd is occasionally on the facile side, but Mr. Woods's performance is crackling and passionate enough to give the character depth despite that; it's also laced with snappish, self-mocking humor that Mr. Woods delivers particularly well. This performance is so razor-sharp that Eddie can be seen coming alive with each little triumph, reveling in each little maneuver and taking each little disappointment terribly hard. His enthusiasm is irresistible.
  11. Bones and All
    Bones and All is a ragged hybrid of genres and styles, an elevated exploitation movie, a succession of moods — anxious, horny, dreamy, sad — in search of a metaphor. Or maybe the metaphor is obvious.
  12. Argentina, 1985
    Cinema prizes a good man making history, but this story’s heroes are manifold.
  13. Something from Tiffany's
    It’s a winning setup, and the director, Daryl Wein, escalates the action shrewdly, with clever rom-com engineering.
  14. Late August, Early September
    If Assayas doesn't always transport his film's events beyond the all too commonplace, his understatement can also yield moments of quiet simplicity.
  15. Exposing Muybridge
    While starchy in presentation, Exposing Muybridge makes clear that its subject’s images still have a lot to show us.
  16. Cats Don't Dance
    While the animated characters, bright colors and an appealing Randy Newman score may keep the children content, Cats Don't Dance is no saccharine fantasy. Its Hollywood references and dark satire constitute its real strengths.
  17. Claydream
    Evans has made a lively and illuminating tribute, and not always an unduly flattering one.
  18. Bliss
    We tend to look at the sex lives of sex workers as endlessly fascinating, but in Bliss the line of work is instead part of a larger take on the hurdles of modern romance.
  19. Human Flowers of Flesh
    There is little story beyond the snatches of conversation we receive, but Human Flowers of Flesh brims with visual and aural detail from the rocky coasts and gurgling reefs.
  20. Do Revenge
    Do Revenge, directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, is a playful, sharp-fanged satire that feels like the ’90s teen comedy hammered into modern emojis: crown, knife, fire, winky face.
  21. End of the Road
    Even when the movie wants for tension, it brims with playful style.
  22. Free Puppies!
    The film achieves its goal in raising awareness for these volunteer efforts, casting a spotlight on a chronically overlooked crisis.
  23. Dalíland
    While Dalíland occasionally edges into caricature, its take on Gala’s role in the marriage, her temperament and feverish attention to money is happily more complicated.
  24. Kaepernick & America
    The verbal analysis here isn’t always profound — one interviewee trots out the banal phrase “the conversation we should be having” — but the narrative as presented in archival footage (Kaepernick did not sit for an interview for this film) is exemplary.
  25. The Redeem Team
    The movie, directed by Jon Weinbach, offers several eye-opening mini-narratives on the way to a rematch with Argentina.
  26. The Three Faces of Eve
    It is written, produced and directed by Mr. Johnson with a clean documentary clarity, and played with superlative flexibility and emotional power by Joanne Woodward in the main role.
  27. Evil Dead Rise
    Lee Cronin, who directed Evil Dead Rise with many more colors of bodily fluid, is a meticulous creator of stunning shots. His camera doesn’t move. It dances, shifting, spinning, occasionally knocked on its side like a running back in a collision.
  28. A Jazzman's Blues
    A Jazzman’s Blues is packed with outsize emotions, but also grand themes.
  29. Heathers: The Musical
    Despite these flashes of timidity and an overlong running time, the musical is a fun romp with plenty of, ahem, killer tunes.
  30. Mr. Harrigan's Phone
    There’s a bittersweetness to Craig and Harrigan’s friendship and good chemistry between the leads.
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