The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,324 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: 9,408 out of 20324
  2. Mixed: 8,449 out of 20324
  3. Negative: 2,467 out of 20324
20324 movie reviews
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  1. Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko
    Although she is buoyant and cheerful, Nikuko is cast as oafish and uncouth, and she is always ultimately the butt of the joke. It’s a puerile, mean-spirited tendency that altogether spoils the otherwise exquisite imagery.
  2. Freakscene: The Story of Dinosaur Jr.
    The movie is nothing if not relentlessly focused on Dinosaur Jr. itself. The band is a noteworthy one. But this treatment feels skimpy.
  3. Endangered
    Covered in isolation, any of these interview subjects, or any of the problems facing journalists raised — online harassment, police intimidation, hedge fund ownership of newspapers, news deserts — might have made for a more detailed and compelling film.
  4. The Policeman's Lineage
    The director, Lee Kyu-man, makes the camera hover tensely over scenes, but only a couple of action sequences pack much oomph. There’s more sinister tension in brief scenes with elder statesmen of the criminal world, who are chillingly self-assured.
  5. Spoiler Alert
    The film is strongest when it falls silent, allowing the actors to communicate their thoughts with a look.
  6. Yanks
    Yanks never succeeds, however, in making these three stories urgent or especially moving.
  7. Trevor: The Musical
    One wonders if this generation’s more attuned and sensitive kids will find this staging of “Trevor” quaint, kitschy — or perhaps still universal.
  8. Honor Society
    A twist whipsaws the movie into a darker place, one in the vicinity of Patricia Highsmith. But no murder takes place, and the movie’s resolution confirms what one may have suspected all along: Its dominant room tone is kinda-sorta that of “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.”
  9. The Art of Making It
    Edwards’s generic approach — heavy on talking heads and explanatory title cards — often yields fuzzy results, with a haphazard rush of information overwhelming the rare moments the documentary settles into a more defined and compelling point of view.
  10. God's Time
    The three principal actors, particularly Sierra, are appealing. But the story is thin, and the jokes are more cute than funny.
  11. Athena
    Gavras’s filmmaking is technically impressive. He pulls the camera through complex, kinetic tableaus in long, breathless takes. Some of these sequences are thrilling, but after a while they become repetitive, and Athena feels more like a video game background than an actual place. There’s no modulation.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jason and the Argonauts
    This absurd, unwieldy adventure — if that's the word—is no worse, but certainly no better, than most of its kind.
  13. The Killer
    While the nimble Jang holds together the robust action sequences — bloody freakouts often captured in slow motion — no one else grounds any of the scenes with any emotion. Consequently, The Killer fails to land a real knockout blow.
  14. On the Come Up
    The predictable narrative arc, the happenstance lighting from scene-to-scene and Lathan’s minimalist take on the material all adds up to something you might watch once and promptly forget about.
  15. Railway Children
    Decency prevails in a somewhat ludicrous finale involving an army of children and a train containing a high-ranking officer. It’s an ending so tidy as to undercut the effort to broach a shameful side to the American war effort.
  16. How to Please a Woman
    This hook piques curiosity — at least enough for a coy eyebrow raise. Light intrigue is often not enough, though, and in this case, the movie strains to sustain charm.
  17. The Good Boss
    The Good Boss provides prime material for Bardem, who has to maintain a polished veneer even as his character’s mendacity and troubles mount. As satire, though, the movie is facile.
  18. The Phantom
    The pleasures are familiar, but not the least bit inspired.
  19. Multiplicity
    Multiplicity weaves such an uninteresting plot around its bland, generic principals that it rarely reaches the absurdist heights its premise demands.
  20. Out of the Blue
    Like most of LaBute’s work, Out of the Blue is talky, sparsely staged and presented with his signature detachment. The two leads are fine.
  21. City Hall
    But this knotty investigative thriller has trouble achieving the rock-solid credibility to hold an audience in thrall.
  22. The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    Depth comes from Efron’s visible difficulty maintaining a smile as he comes to sense that he’s crossed the ocean only to discover a permanent gulf between him and his childhood friends. They’ve endured agonies he’ll never understand — and a barfly like him can’t deliver a cheers that will set things right.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Blood of a Poet
    While the various imaginery episodes shown on the screen, to the accompaniment of microphone comment by M. Cocteau himself, reinforced by English titles for those unfamiliar with French, have a certain fascination, especially for persons interested in film technique, they are hardly calculated to set the Hudson River on fire.
  24. Causeway
    Causeway is both thin and heavy-handed, its plot overly diagramed and its characters inadequately fleshed out. The burden of making it credible falls disproportionately on Henry and Lawrence, superb actors who do what they can to bring the script’s static and fuzzy ideas about pain, alienation and the need for connection to something that almost resembles life.
  25. Seoul Vibe
    The caper, directed by Moon Hyun-sung, isn’t as fun as it insists it is, playing up the crew and its exploits à la “The Fast and the Furious” and “Baby Driver” but never hitting its stride.
  26. Heat
    The setting is Las Vegas, where Mex wins and loses a lot of money in blackjack without getting too excited about it, and things work up tepidly to the big battle in a factory handily stocked with murderous devices.
  27. Goodnight Mommy
    Kyle Warren’s screenplay is potent enough to generate several moments of suspense, and Watts, an exceptional actor sidelined too often by poor choices, is not the problem here. That would be the decision to jettison the children’s most creative cruelties — and consequently much of the movie’s tension — and a director, Matt Sobel, who’s determined to steer the audience toward a specific interpretation of events.
  28. My Best Friend's Exorcism
    The film repeatedly undercuts whatever tension is mustered with its frustrating tendency to crack goofy, juvenile jokes.
  29. We Might As Well Be Dead
    The images are artfully crafted, but the narrative lacks momentum. The film flirts with themes of surveillance and immigrant anxieties, but its allegoric ambitions are continually thwarted by yet another neighborly grievance.
  30. Quest for Camelot
    The movie offers a grab bag of oddball characters who seem unfocused, and its visual rhythms are jerky and spasmodic.
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