The New York Times' Scores

For 20,278 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:
20278 movie reviews
  1. Shot in richly toned, wide-screen black and white, Aferim! looks like an elegant exercise in period playacting. But it casts a fierce, revisionist eye on the past, finding the cruelty and prejudice that lie beneath the pageantry.
  2. Is God Is asks us to pay heed — in ways subtle and bold — to its comedy and anguish. It demands, without seeming to, that we watch to see, really see.
  3. Superstition, witchcraft, exorcism, talismans that ward off evil: in this land of the supernatural, irrationality prevails. But War Witch is so cleareyed that it makes you wonder how much more irrational this world is than the so-called civilized one under its camouflage of material wealth.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical devotion to science-fiction detail, that its is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.
  4. In other words, the movie is exactly what you expect — not more, not less — from an estimably well-oiled machine like Pixar.
  5. Mr. Sauper has produced an extraordinary work of visual journalism, a richly illustrated report on a distant catastrophe that is also one of the central stories of our time.
  6. Maddin's real point -- and, for admirers of this brilliant and idiosyncratic artist, the true source of the movie’s interest -- is that Winnipeg explains him.
  7. Most of the accusations have been reported on extensively in the last two years in various publications. What the film does is bring these accounts to living, breathing and moving life, taking us beyond the media cycles of allegation and denial to a survivor’s intimate confrontations with cultural pressures and trauma.
  8. An unnerving but unsatisfying chronicle of a German village filled with hidden cruelty, set on the eve of World War I.
  9. Abetted by Patrick Orth’s careful, almost obsessively calm camerawork, Köhler has concocted an uncommonly subtle and deliberately ambiguous work, one that’s delicately rewarding, if you meet it halfway.
  10. Here is an American film, in Japanese with English subtitles, written, directed and photographed by Americans, made in Japan with a Japanese cast, which attempts to reveal the spiritual mysteries of a quintessentially Japanese phenomenon. That it doesn't succeed is almost a foregone conclusion. What is surprising, however, is that Mishima is as tolerable as it is, given all the strikes against it.
  11. Hunt Stromberg and his associates have managed to turn out a film which catches the spirit and humor of Miss Austen's novel down to the last impudent flounce of a petticoat, the last contented sigh of a conquering coquette.
  12. For all its playful color-block hues and deceptively casual illustrations, the movie delivers a sharp mix of pathos and humor.
  13. It’s a piece of mainstream American entertainment in the best sense — an assertion of impatience and faith, a celebration of communal ties and individual gumption, a testimony to the power of art to turn struggles into the stuff of dreams.
  14. In their last years, the Kraffts spent most of their time studying the killers, hoping to discover patterns that would enable people living in the path of destruction to escape. They risked their lives to do this, and the movie argues that their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. More than that, it preserves their work and their idiosyncratic, unforgettable human presence.
  15. BLACK humor, abundant originality and a brilliant visual style make Joel Coen's Blood Simple a directorial debut of extraordinary promise.
  16. Mr. Trier and Mr. Lie - a quiet, recessive but nonetheless magnetically self-assured screen presence - emphasize Anders's individuality above all. Oslo, August 31st has the satisfying gravity of specific experience, and also, true to its title, a prickly sense of place.
  17. Buckley’s performance is ferocious and astounding, starting off strong and somehow picking up power as the movie goes along.
  18. With a gentle rap-rapping, Mr. Eggers intensifies the shivers with art-film moves, genre shocks and an excellent cast that includes a progressively rowdy menagerie.
  19. Mr. Johnson throws a lot at the screen, blasted corpses included, yet little here is as initially transfixing as Mr. Gordon-Levitt's mug.
  20. Graduation is long and intense, a rigorously naturalistic film that at times feels as claustrophobic and suspenseful as a horror movie. Like Mr. Mungiu’s other work, it is a thriller of sorts, built around an excruciating ethical problem. He is unstinting in his sympathy and unsparing in his judgment.
  21. The action is gorgeously fluid, the idiosyncratic 3-D visual conceits (including floating eyeballs undersea) are startling, and the story and its metaphors resolve in unexpected and moving ways.
  22. Under the direction of James (''The Terminator'') Cameron, [the special effects team has] put together a flaming, flashing, crashing, crackling blow-'em-up show that keeps you popping from your seat despite your better instincts and the basically conventional scare tactics.
  23. Room at the Top is quite conservative in its morality — although its sledgehammer ending still packs an emotional wallop.
  24. The deadpan style of the acting functions as a vaccine against sentimentality, but there is no doubting the sincerity of this movie’s motives or the effectiveness of its methods.
  25. The actors add some filigree to their genre types, but are consistently upstaged by the superb, supple camerawork. With the cinematographer Miguel Ioann Littin Menz, Patterson turns the camera into an uneasily embodied presence and when it takes flight so does the movie.
  26. A triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year.
  27. No admirer of Mr. von Trier's work should miss this compelling rarity.
  28. Mr. Jacobs has succeeded at one of the most difficult tasks given a director, which is to make a character come alive through the filmmaking, not exposition.
  29. The gravity and force of Mr. Phoenix’s performance and Ms. Ramsay’s direction are impressive, but it’s hard not to feel that their talents have been misapplied, and that there is less to the movie than meets the eye.

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