The New York Times' Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. Spider-Man 2
    Better than its predecessor, and also superior to most other comic-book-based movies. It has a more credible (and more frightening) villain, a more capacious and original story and a self-confidence based not only on the huge success of the first "Spider-Man" but also on Mr. Raimi's intuitive and enthusiastic grasp of the material.
  2. True Grit
    A marvelously rambling frontier fable packed with extraordinary incidents, amazing encounters, noble characters and virtuous rewards.
  3. Viet and Nam
    Quy treats the love affair between Viet and Nam with exquisite tenderness.
  4. Rose Plays Julie
    Amid the lush greenery of the setting, the atmosphere is perpetually bone-chilling — complete with an ominously high-pitched score — making the film seem distant and difficult to fully embrace
  5. Saint Frances
    With a warm heart and a nonjudgmental mind, Saint Frances weaves abortion, same-sex parenting and postpartum depression into a narrative bursting with positivity and acceptance.
  6. Mandy
    The movie’s imagery is consistently unearthly; its pacing has a magisterial weight. Call it pulp Tarkovsky, maybe.
  7. When We Were Kings
    Mr. Gast skillfully blends photographs, celebrity interviews with Norman Mailer and others, and colorful forays into the Zairian countryside, where Ali fostered black brotherhood and became a huge favorite, in a film that ''gazes well beyond the ring and seeks engagement with history''.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    20 Feet from Stardom
    This generous, fascinating documentary about the careers of backup singers, most of them African-American women, seeks to rewrite the history of pop music by focusing attention on voices at once marginal and vital.
  9. Avatar
    Glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.
  10. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
    Mr. Morgen was given access to Cobain’s archives — “art, music, journals, Super 8 films and audio montages” — and his exhilarating, exhausting, two-hour-plus film, both an artful mosaic and a hammering barrage, reflects years of rummaging through that trove.
  11. 20th Century Women
    20th Century Women is a memory movie, one in which people are conjured up to bump against the larger world, exuberantly and uneasily.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Name Is Albert Ayler
    Named after one of his albums and built around snippets of audio interviews with Mr. Ayler, it attempts and often achieves a fresh, playful style that’s equally informed by jazz traditions and Mr. Ayler’s urge to shatter them.
  13. Love
    The director Dag Johan Haugerud’s gently humanistic drama is one of those films that feels akin to a prism, refracting its theme into the array of colors it contains.
  14. Klondike
    The director favors absurdist tableaus . . . placid camera moves counterpointed by brutality and shots held so long that it almost seems as if the filmmaker is the one being cruel. It’s a grimly effective strategy for a harsh but powerful movie.
  15. Wuthering Heights
    It is Goldwyn at his best, and better still, Emily Brontë at hers. Out of her strange tale of a tortured romance Mr. Goldwyn and his troupe have fashioned a strong and somber film, poetically written as the novel not always was, sinister and wild as it was meant to be, far more compact dramatically than Miss Brontë had made it.
  16. Pina
    The cumulative effect is exhilarating and also a bit frustrating, since so many dances are included and woven together the audience does not have the chance to experience any single work in its entirety. But the power and intelligence of Bausch's approach, which at times seems more cerebral than sensual, is communicated.
  17. Animal Kingdom
    The film's depiction of the raw fear lurking below the brothers' braggadocio is the most pronounced emotion in a movie whose focus on the personalities of its criminals suggests an Australian answer to "Goodfellas," minus the wise-guy humor.
  18. La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus
    Mark Kendall’s quietly moving documentary, La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus, is as modest and farsighted as its cast of Guatemalans who make a living resurrecting discarded American school buses.
  19. Rosie
    [A] moving drama ... With its quiet realism and almost unbearably intimate hand-held camera work ... "Rosie" holds our hands to a flame of desperation.
  20. A Room with a View
    As Lucy Honeychurch, Miss Bonham Carter gives a remarkably complex performance of a young woman who is simultaneously reasonable and romantic, generous and selfish, and timid right up to the point where she takes a heedless plunge into the unknown.
  21. Hugo
    Waves of melancholy wash over the story and keep the treacle at bay, as do the spasms of broad comedy, much of it nimbly executed by Mr. Baron Cohen.
  22. Wild Reeds
    [A] delicate, lovingly photographed, strongly acted coming-of-age story.
  23. The LEGO Movie
    The visual environment created by the filmmakers (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of “21 Jump Street” wrote and directed; the animation is by Animal Logic) hums with wit and imagination... The story is a busy, slapdash contraption designed above all to satisfy the imperatives of big-budget family entertainment.
  24. Ladybird Ladybird
    Ladybird, Ladybird is a tough, utterly absorbing film even at moments when it seems to skirt some of the fine points of Maggie's difficulties.
  25. Gloria
    The great accomplishment of Gloria, the Chilean writer-director Sebastián Lelio’s astute, unpretentious and thrillingly humane new film, is that it acknowledges both sides of its heroine’s temperament without judgment or sentimentality.
  26. Drag Me to Hell
    Drag Me to Hell has a tonic playfulness that’s unabashedly retro, an indulgent return to Mr. Raimi’s goofy, gooey roots.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
    The movie’s “Rocky” formula proves irresistible anyway; unsurprisingly, New Line has commissioned Mr. Gordon to remake this story with actors.
  28. Taxidermia
    Belongs to a school of Central European surrealism that marries nightmarish horror with formal beauty.
  29. Spider
    Brilliantly realized but bone-chillingly bleak.
  30. Hadewijch
    If Hadewijch is Mr. Dumont's most overtly religious film, it is not pro-faith in any specific way, although the director clearly respects the religious impulse.
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