The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,336 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: 9,413 out of 20336
  2. Mixed: 8,455 out of 20336
  3. Negative: 2,468 out of 20336
20336 movie reviews
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  1. Bitter Money
    It’s not clear that the director quite found what he was looking for.
  2. Breaking In
    With an overbearing score, Breaking In telegraphs almost everything that happens yet still provides several jolts amid its occasionally questionable twists. While the filmmakers aren’t exerting themselves to deliver anything other than a popcorn-seller, Ms. Union is working hard to keep you watching.
  3. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    Self-pitying or smug, jaunty or crestfallen, callous or contrite, the movie’s fitful tone is fully yoked to Joaquin Phoenix’s sodden-to-sober lead performance.
  4. Domino
    De Palma can’t realize all the elaborate effects he clearly wanted (the film’s climax occurs at a bullfight that’s conspicuously not crowded). But his direction often compensates with B-movie energy, particularly when he’s able to concentrate on his perverse vision.
  5. Hold the Dark
    The movie keeps moving, the story keeps flowing, but these images — which feel suspended between cinema and still photography — create a pause in the action that your anxious imagination can’t help but fret over. That’s especially true because Mr. Saulnier’s images are often in service of spooky, blood-drenched tales.
  6. Mermaids
    A terribly gentle if wisecracking comedy about the serious business of growing up.
  7. The Banishment
    The first two-thirds are an extraordinary slow burn that provides ample time to admire Mr. Zvyagintsev’s talent with the wide frame. The movie is marred by an unsatisfying resolution, which has a coyness better suited to literature.
  8. Generation Wealth
    Darting from micro to macro and back again, squashing obscene consumption against child beauty pageants and ruinous debt, its structure makes for an unfocused thesis. The through line, though, works, as Ms. Greenfield repeatedly turns her camera on her own family and career choices.
  9. Juliet, Naked
    Mr. Peretz and the screenwriters (Evgenia Peretz, the director’s sister, is credited along with Tamara Jenkins and Jim Taylor) find an amiable farcical groove, and the actors embrace the ridiculousness of the circumstances without overdoing it.
  10. West of the Jordan River
    Through interviews with Israeli politicians, and Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank, West of the Jordan River gives voice to peace-seeking residents on both sides of the conflict.
  11. The Long Dumb Road
    The leads’ chemistry nearly redeems this shopworn setup, and the movie is at its best when it simply chills out with them.
  12. The Great Escape
    There are a few moments when Richard Attenborough as the chief engineer of the whole project demonstrates some impressive strength and poise. But for much longer than is artful or essential, The Great Escape grinds out its tormenting story without a peek beneath the surface of any man, without a real sense of human involvement. It's a strictly mechanical adventure with make-believe men.
  13. The Opera House
    To its credit, The Opera House, directed by Susan Froemke, only sometimes plays like a fund-raising tool.
  14. Itzhak
    We get a brief dip into his family’s past and emigration from Israel, but the filmmaker never digs deeply enough to reveal any other substantial dimension of this man, or her theories about what shaped him.
  15. Finding Your Feet
    Watching it demands little effort. Evict your inner cynic and enjoying it should demand even less.
  16. The Sentence
    By making you feel deeply for his sister and her children, Valdez has fashioned his film to make the lapses less glaring.
  17. Assassination Nation
    Often it feels like reading a Twitter thread of ideas and hashtags, rather than watching a movie. Yet the final act, a “Purge”-like blood bath to the tune of vengeance, is aesthetically arresting.
  18. Nancy
    What’s left is a strange, sour tale that’s neither origin mystery nor journey of self-discovery, but a vexing gesture toward damage and delusion that never permits us to peek under its broken heroine’s hood.
  19. Midnighters
    As tables turn and turn again — nudged along by a wolfish impostor (Ward Horton) and some creative torturing — the movie allows scant time to ponder each new tack.
  20. Moving
    Moving isn't anything out of the ordinary, but those who have shared at least some of these experiences ought to find it amusing.
  21. Hiding Out
    Mr. Giraldi, who also directs commercials, takes a fairly ordinary approach to this easygoing teen-age comedy about a stockbroker in his mid-20's who must pretend to be a high-school student. The material is pleasant enough, and Mr. Cryer is a good deal less strained here than he has been in other roles, affecting a natural manner and a good way with wisecracks.
  22. Becks
    Perhaps recognizing their biggest asset, the directors, Elizabeth Rohrbaugh and Daniel Powell, allow Ms. Hall’s numbers to play out at length... If the screenplay perhaps backs itself into a corner, its irresolution feels true to life.
  23. Shocker
    With its freewheeling mixture of gore, surrealism and Freud, it will do almost anything to grab attention. If the movie's metaphors are as obvious and as portentous as the heavy metal music that punctuates the action, Shocker at least has the feel of a movie that was fun to make.
  24. Hondros
    If the movie doesn’t go more than skin deep in interrogating questions about interventions both military and journalistic into the Middle East, it does succeed in opening up Mr. Hondros’s contradiction-filled world.
  25. The Toxic Avenger
    The Toxic Avenger may be trash, but it has a maniacally farcical sense of humor, and Tromaville's evildoers are dispatched in ingenious ways. One is dry-cleaned to death, another made into pizza, a third partly french-fried.
  26. Pope Francis - A Man of His Word
    The interview sections are fascinating, and scenes of the pope’s travels, during which he frequently washes the feet of those who come to him, are moving.... Less welcome are Mr. Wenders’s brief attempts at depicting the life of St. Francis himself.
  27. For the Love of Benji
    The card announcing the film's G rating was roundly booed by the youngsters though at almost every sight of the dog they screamed with mouth-filled delight.
  28. The Secret of NIMH
    Resourceful and valiant though unsuccessful attempt to revive the kind of animated feature identified with the Golden Age of Walt Disney. If The Secret of N.I.M.H. had had a screenplay to equal its great visual qualities, it might have become a classic in its own right.
  29. Earth Girls Are Easy
    With a scatter-shot style that includes lengthy, often lame song-and-dance parodies, as well as special effects, slapstick and satire, the film can't begin to sustain its lunatic premise. But during the lulls between witty scenes, there is always something amusing to look at. Mr. Temple and his collaborators create a near-California so cartoonish and crayon-colored that the film comes to seem like Aliens in Toyland.
  30. White Fang
    A scenic and enveloping nature film about a young man and his beloved pet. But it is by no means strictly a children's film, and it certainly isn't Lassie.
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