The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Nostalgia for the Light
    The film's passionate insistence on remembrance lends it a moral as well as a metaphysical weight. Mr. Guzmán's belief in eternal memory is an astounding leap of faith.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bill Cunningham New York
    If the film suggests that there's something bittersweet about a life dedicated to a single pursuit cultivated with an almost religious fervor, it also stands in awe of its subject's seemingly inexhaustible, self-abnegating capacity to remain attuned to the expression of others.
  3. Foreign Parts
    People talk but don't say too much, and as curious and thorough as Ms. Paravel and Mr. Sniadecki are - Foreign Parts is the result of many months of patient filming - they are too polite to pry. But their tact adds to the richness of their film, which discovers a busy, complicated world within the space of few unlovely city blocks.
  4. The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte)
    There is something startling, even shocking, about the angle of vision Mr. Frammartino imposes by juxtaposing apparently disparate elements and lingering on what seem at first to be insignificant details. You have never seen anything like this movie, even though what it shows you has been there all along.
  5. Queen to Play
    In small but significant ways, Queen to Play defies expectations. It dangles the possibility of an affair between Hélène and Kröger in games that the film likens to courtship rituals in a classic screwball comedy.
  6. Blank City
    Ms. Danhier manages to conjure a glorious and grungy bygone past without fetishizing it as a golden age. A bunch of people got together and did some stuff, and this is what it looked like.
  7. The Secret World of Arrietty
    What the studio does, brilliantly, is preserve a hand-drawn look and feel in its work, as in the exteriors in The Secret World, where the characters pop against a painterly meadow.
  8. Moonrise Kingdom
    Moonrise Kingdom breezes along with a beautifully coordinated admixture of droll humor, deadpan and slapstick. Like all of Mr. Anderson's films, though, there's a deep, pervasive melancholia here too.
  9. Project Nim
    There is no doubt that Nim was exploited, and also no doubt that he was loved. Mr. Marsh, by allowing those closest to Nim plenty of room to explain themselves, examines the moral complexity of this story without didacticism. He allows the viewer, alternately appalled, touched and fascinated, to be snagged on some of its ethical thorns.
  10. Kati with an I
    Buoyed by a fully integrated soundtrack, Kati With an I delivers a lovingly personal observation of young people at a crossroads. The film's sound is not always crisp, but no matter: Kati's story is written in every vital, vérité frame.
  11. The Family Jams
    The low-key, hand-held Family Jams may not ever attain the stature of, say, a concert film like D. A. Pennebaker's "Don't Look Back." But it should, as a record of musicians in youthful flower, sharing a loose, heartfelt camaraderie and lack of pretension.
  12. A Screaming Man
    It's a modest film, if only in scale and apparent budget, about some of the greatest questions in life, like the existence of God, our capacity to see beyond our own vanity and the legacies of fathers, both blood and state.
  13. The Arbor
    Like a Ken Loach drama stripped to bare bones, The Arbor springs to life in the bright bitterness of Dunbar's prose, showcased in alfresco performances of contentious scenes from the play.
  14. The First Beautiful Thing
    Comedy and poignancy weave together in Mr. Virzì's hands, but the maudlin meter only occasionally goes into the red zone. And Ms. Pandolfi gives such an exquisitely understated performance that you don't realize until the very end that the film was as much about her character as it was about Bruno and Anna.
  15. The Trip
    As in many road movies, the trip becomes an occasion for philosophizing, a journey inward and out as the men joust and parry, improvising and entertaining each other, at times by imitating, hilariously, someone else (Michael Caine, Sean Connery).
  16. Buck
    In some sense it was beauty that saved Mr. Brannaman, that of his conscience and that of horses, which, having been tied to humans long ago, became companions, workers and for some, as this lovely movie shows, saviors.
  17. The Last Mountain
    If Mr. Haney sometimes struggles to find focus, he has no trouble locating heroes, including the doggedly energetic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a slew of stalwart locals and fearless outsiders. And the black heart of coal country - and, as the film shows, our national energy debate - has never seemed so in need of white knights.
  18. Red White & Blue
    Red White & Blue proves the director a bona fide storyteller with more tools in his arsenal than shock and awe.
  19. Harvest
    During this meticulously written and exquisitely acted film, you come to sense the bonds and the wounds binding three generations of Monopolis, who definitely love one another, but with reservations.
  20. Octubre
    With a visual style and a deadpan humor that owes an obvious debt to the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki ("Drifting Clouds"), they hold their shots long enough for you to scan details, look deep into faces and think on how little (or much) it takes to be happy. Here a painted Jesus hovers on a chipped wall, but it's an unholy family of three that finds heaven on earth.
  21. ParaNorman
    Far more than Norman's adventure, which takes him from home to a cemetery and deep into his town's history, what pulls you in, quickening your pulse and widening your eyes, are the myriad visual enchantments - from the rich, nubby tactility of his clothes to the skull-and-bones adorning his bedroom wallpaper.
  22. Dark Shadows
    Dark Shadows isn't among Mr. Burton's most richly realized works, but it's very enjoyable, visually sumptuous and, despite its lugubrious source material and a sporadic tremor of violence, surprisingly effervescent.
  23. Rejoice and Shout
    Your religion or lack of one doesn't matter. At some point while watching the film, you may feel that music IS God, or if not, a close approximation of divinity.
  24. !Women Art Revolution
    These interviews form the backbone of !W.A.R., and like the film, they're passionate, contentious, funny, sincere, politically attuned.
  25. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    The movie is a curiosity cabinet of visual pleasures but so breezy and lightly funny that you may not realize at first how good it is.
  26. The Lips
    Woven throughout is a deeply rewarding recognition of the sustaining power of female companionship.
  27. Battle for Brooklyn
    A documentary about the unending mess that is the Atlantic Yards project, is unabashedly slanted and as a result will probably be dismissed by those it portrays unflatteringly. That's unfortunate, because this film should be discouraging and dismaying for people on all sides of the project, for what it says about oversize expectations and missed opportunities.
  28. Attack the Block
    This fabulously inventive debut feature, written and directed by the British comedian Joe Cornish, never flags.
  29. Bully
    Bully forces you to confront not the cruelty of specific children - who have their own problems, and their good sides as well - but rather the extent to which that cruelty is embedded in our schools and therefore in our society as a whole.
  30. Crime After Crime
    Recording every success and setback, the wrenching documentary Crime After Crime favors the personal over the political, creating a no-frills portrait of a stoic and remarkably unembittered woman.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »