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. The Kindergarten Teacher
    Fluidly capturing the trajectory of a ruinous obsession, the writer and director, Sara Colangelo, skillfully fudges the line between mentoring and manipulation, and between nurturing talent and appropriating it. Suffusing each scene with an insinuating, prickly tension, she remains ruthlessly committed to her screw-tightening tone, offering the viewer no comforting moral escape hatch.
  2. Sorry to Bother You
    Mr. Riley isn’t constructing yet another postmodern playhouse out of borrowings and allusions. He’s building a raft, and steering it straight into the foaming rapids of racism, economic injustice and cultural conflict.
  3. Clara's Ghost
    As is perhaps appropriate, given the comic occupations of the Reynolds (and the Elliott) family, this unusual, unsettling and terrific little film presents itself not as a domestic opera, but as a family comedy.
  4. Brother's Keeper
    It's a rich slice of Americana that would seem to belong to an earlier, pre-television era, except that television comes to play a large part in Delbert's story. It's also about an aspect of life in rural America that's seldom seen by people who drive through it, and seldom if ever glimpsed in movies.
  5. The Last Family
    The tragedies in this family’s life are nearly constant, but Mr. Matuszynski approaches them with a tone that’s matter-of-fact while also partaking in the particular wry irony that has been a hallmark of Polish cinema since the early 1960s.
  6. Shot in the Dark
    This director isn’t afraid of silence, and he’s prepared to let a quiet moment speak for itself. Attentive viewing is required, and rewarded.
  7. Shirkers
    Like a photograph slowly developing before our eyes, Shirkers (which was also the title of the original picture) is both mystery and manhunt, a captivating account of shattered friendship and betrayed trust. The skill of the editing (by Tan and two colleagues), though, is key.
  8. The Guilty
    Unfolding in real time, this immediately involving story bends and turns in surprising, sometimes horrifying ways. Enriched by Oskar Skriver’s marvelous sound editing, which takes us from a speeding van to a bloodcurdling crime scene with equal authenticity, the movie smoothly blends police procedural with character study.
  9. Mandy
    The movie’s imagery is consistently unearthly; its pacing has a magisterial weight. Call it pulp Tarkovsky, maybe.
  10. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    Satire and outrage are easier approaches than the tact and empathy Ms. Akhavan deploys. The Miseducation of Cameron Post, confident in its beliefs and curious about what makes its characters tick, is more interested in listening than in preaching.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    North by Northwest
    The lines and the expert manipulation of the principals are tributes to the outstanding talents of Messrs. Lehman and Hitchcock.
  12. Blaze
    The usual sequence of ballad-of-a-tormented-artist verses plays out: early promise; success and betrayal; redemption and death. What pulls against the relentless momentum of biography is the sweet inertia of life, a lot of which is spent drunk, in bed, on the road, hanging out with friends or all of the above.
  13. Rear Window
    Mr. Stewart does a first-class job, playing the whole thing from a wheel chair and making points with his expressions and eyes. His handling of a lens-hound's paraphernalia in scanning the action across the way is very important to the color and fascination of the film.
  14. The Peacemaker
    The movie is a fascinating portrait that is if anything too brief.
  15. Angels Wear White
    The moral rot and callous corruption depicted in Angels Wear White has a particularly bracing effect in part because, cultural specifics aside, the inhumanity on display is hardly alien.
  16. I Kill Giants
    Magical, subtle, sensitive and touching, I Kill Giants is everything the bombastic “A Wrinkle in Time” is not.
  17. Threads
    Clearly, Threads is not a balanced discussion about the pros and cons of nuclear armaments. It is a candidly biased warning. And it is, as calculated, unsettlingly powerful. [12 Feb 1985, p.42]
    • The New York Times
  18. The Accused
    A consistently engrossing melodrama, modest in its aims and as effective for the cliches it avoids as for the clear eye through which it sees its working-class American lives.
  19. El Mar La Mar
    The result is simultaneously elusive and concrete: abstract cinema that packs a punch.
  20. To Be or Not to Be
    Smashingly funny...This To Be or Not to Be scarcely misses a comic beat right from the opening sequence.
  21. Daughter of Mine
    Ardent and primal, Daughter of Mine addresses complicated ideas with head-clearing simplicity.
  22. Infinite Football
    While the movie has allegorical resonances with the political and human rights disasters of 20th-century Romania, by the end, its surfaces, while remaining superficially unimpressive, open up as the film moves from epistemological speculation onto a plane of mysticism. This relatively short film contains worlds.
  23. Throw Momma from the Train
    As Owen, Mr. DeVito is such an odd combination of the childlike and the diabolical that he remains a captivating figure throughout the story. Mr. DeVito's comic timing is particularly enjoyable, since he has such a slow, steady, deliberate way of building up to outrageous behavior.
  24. Stakeout
    Delivers excitement, humor and good nature. The director uses the conventions of the action-comedy in so adroit a way that you may even forget the hundred other films you've seen lately about a couple of cops kidding around with each other in between battling the bad guys.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Workshop
    It’s a measure of this film’s stealthy brilliance that it blurs the line between empathy and exploitation.
  26. 1985
    Cory Michael Smith’s performance as Adrian is a quiet marvel in a movie that’s superbly acted all around. The film’s intimate consideration of still-enormous issues is intelligent, surprising and emotionally resonant.
  27. Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
    The relief of Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami is that it seeks to square the person with the provocateuse. The documentary is a feat of portraiture and a restoration of humanity. It’s got the uncanny, the sublime, and, in many spots, a combination of both.
  28. Ava
    Lurching relentlessly from one conflict to another, the movie distills its emotions — and maintains its momentum — in conversations of remarkably controlled intensity.
  29. Personal Problems (1980)
    This is a work that looks as if it were evolving even as portions of it were completed. That’s entirely appropriate. For all its rough edges, Personal Problems retains a vitality and an integrity that practically bounds off the screen.
  30. The Electric Horseman
    Invigorating.
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