The New York Times' Scores

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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
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  1. Botso
    With enough tragic-restorative plot twists for a 12-hour mini-series, Botso is an enchanting film for two reasons: Mr. Korisheli’s humanity is magnetic, and no more beautiful case could be made for the psychological healing power of making music.
  2. Revenge of the Mekons
    The film is both a generous primer on the band, which grew out of the punk movement in Leeds, England, in 1977, and a celebration of its longevity.
  3. Ex Machina
    [Mr. Garland] plays with visual contrasts — Mr. Isaac’s compact, muscled body and Mr. Gleeson’s long, drooping one, picture windows that look out onto an expansively lush landscape and windowless rooms that register as upmarket prison cells — that dovetail with the narrative’s multiple, amusingly deployed dualities: confinement and liberation, agency and submission, mind and body.
  4. Black Panther
    It wouldn’t be a Marvel production without manly skirmishes and digital avatars. Yet in its emphasis on black imagination, creation and liberation, the movie becomes an emblem of a past that was denied and a future that feels very present. And in doing so opens up its world, and yours, beautifully.
  5. Zootopia
    Funny, smart, thought-provoking — and musical, too.
  6. Bad Hair
    Bad Hair is an uncomfortably accurate depiction of a poignant mother-son power struggle in a fatherless family in which each knows how to get under the other’s skin.
  7. Little Hope Was Arson
    The filmmaker, Theo Love, presents the people in the story as they are, without passing judgment and without apology, whether they are investigators or pastors or just ordinary folks caught up in the inexplicable. It’s Americana unvarnished and, because of that, as absorbing as it is respectful.
  8. Little White Lie
    Few moments in recent nonfiction cinema are as piercing as the one in which Ms. Schwartz asks her mother if she might have settled down with Mr. Parker had he not been black.
  9. Horse Money
    The puzzle-box narrative only grows more hypnotic with repeat viewings. The movie insists on having the audience, like Ventura, pass through madness to reach catharsis.
  10. Uzumasa Limelight
    Directing with an old-fashioned tenderness toward his unassuming star, Ken Ochiai conjures a swan song to a waning art form and those who practice it.
  11. Something, Anything
    Examining a more generalized discontent through the lens of one woman’s pain, the writer and director, Paul Harrill, concentrates instead on the ordinary details that constitute a life and the way small choices nudge us toward larger ones.
  12. Valley of Saints
    Valley of Saints finds a poignant humanity in this chaste romance, which awakens in Gulzar a wondrous sense of possibility, along with a new awareness of the world’s complexity.
  13. La Última Película
    The movie revels in multiple film stocks (with hairs or threads often on the camera lens) and self-conscious “Last Movie” flourishes (long intervals between credits, “scene missing” title cards, a version of “Me and Bobby McGee”) while maintaining its blithe humor.
  14. Testament of Youth
    Testament of Youth, James Kent’s stately screen adaptation of the British author Vera Brittain’s 1933 World War I memoir, evokes the march of history with a balance and restraint exhibited by few movies with such grand ambitions.
  15. Play
    It is provocative simply in showing how trust is gained and kept, even after the swindled kids have understood their robbers’ motives.
  16. Hard to Be a God
    Mr. German was just as stubborn in sticking to his personal vision (and revisions) as he was innovative in his storytelling, and he’s left behind a final opus that is hard to shake.
  17. The Witch
    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.
  18. Mississippi Grind
    Mississippi Grind itself may be a bit of a throwback to the lived-in, character-driven, landscape-besotted films of the 1970s, but it’s less a pastiche or a homage than the cinematic equivalent of a classic song, expertly covered.
  19. Mistress America
    Far from romanticizing creativity and the artistic process, Mr. Baumbach’s films portray the world of painters, filmmakers and literati as an overcrowded, amoral jungle of viperish entitled narcissists stealing from one another for fame and profit.
  20. Results
    The triumph of Results is that it pretends to be loose, lazy and lived-in when it’s actually disciplined, hard-working and in almost perfect shape.
  21. Christmas, Again
    This is a Christmas movie in which magic exists largely on the periphery, and that is just the right mix of chilly and sweet.
  22. City of Gold
    City of Gold transcends its modest methods, largely because it connects Mr. Gold’s appealing personality with a passionate argument about the civic culture of Los Angeles and the place of food within it.
  23. Entertainment
    Mr. Alverson jacks up the tension with exquisite restraint.
  24. Finders Keepers
    Revealing its humanity slowly and a little tardily, Finders Keepers finally does justice to its dueling antiheroes.
  25. How to Change the World
    This absorbing account is hardly definitive, but it teaches movement building without denying the high costs paid by true believers.
  26. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    Focusing on the magazine and not its offshoots, the film is uproarious, not for what its many talking heads say but for its astonishing procession of brilliant, boundary-breaching illustrations and captions (augmented by some animation), many of which are as explosively funny today as they were when first published.
  27. Brooklyn
    Brooklyn endows its characters with desires and aspirations, but not with foresight, and it examines the past with open-minded curiosity rather than with sentimentality or easy judgment.
  28. Love & Friendship
    At times, most often when Mr. Bennett is onscreen, Love & Friendship is howlingly funny, and as a whole it feels less like a romance than like a caper, an unabashedly contrived and effortlessly inventive heist movie with a pretty good payoff.
  29. 45 Years
    [A] sensitive and devastating portrait of a long, happy marriage in sudden crisis.
  30. Victoria
    Victoria is a sensational cinematic stunt.
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