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. Silver Linings Playbook
    For all its high-flying zaniness the movie has the sting of life, and its humor feels dredged up from the same dark, boggy place from which Samuel Beckett extracted his yuks.
  2. 12 Days
    [A] lucid, focused and adamant documentary.
  3. A Self-Made Hero
    But this miracle of self-invention has more virtue in the abstract than it does on screen.
  4. Mistress Dispeller
    Lo’s construction of each person’s story grants them dignity and compassion. And their agreement at the end speaks volumes about what they saw in the film, too.
  5. Buena Vista Social Club
    The concert scenes find the stage awash in such intense joy, camaraderie and nationalist pride that you become convinced that making music is a key to longevity and spiritual well-being.
  6. Norte, the End of History
    It is the work of a director as fascinated by decency as by ugliness, and able to present the chaos of life in a series of pictures that are at once luminously clear and endlessly mysterious.
  7. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    On a deeper level, Shoot Me is an unflinchingly honest examination of a woman who is aware that the end is approaching.
  8. Huesera: The Bone Woman
    "Huesera" is the type of staggering supernatural nightmare that is as transfixing as it is terrifying.
  9. Waiting for 'Superman'
    By showing how fiercely dedicated idealists are making a difference, it is a call to arms.
  10. Rimini
    We know there’s great tragedy and ugliness behind the smoke and mirrors, but we watch in amusement nonetheless. Sinisterly, Seidl reminds us how easy it is to turn people into objects for the taking.
  11. Ray & Liz
    Performed with absolute commitment by its cast (Justin Salinger and Ella Smith play the younger versions of the title characters), Ray & Liz is a quietly harrowing movie. Billingham risks tedium, though, in withholding anything like an inner life for any of its characters until the movie’s very end.
  12. A Thousand and One
    In A Thousand and One, [Rockwell] packs a great deal into her filmmaking, which bristles with looks, gestures, bodies in breakneck motion and expressionistic jolts of color that — like Gary Gunn’s gorgeous score — complicate and deepen the outwardly simple story.
  13. Tantura
    The emerging film is not simply a persuasive augmentation of Katz’s argument, but also a disturbing portrait of how very human impulses — passivity, rationalization, social pressures — can shape the writing of history.
  14. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
    DaCosta’s talents as a director are a terrific, confident match for this material.
  15. Encounters at the End of the World
    Like many of Mr. Herzog's movies, fiction and nonfiction, Encounters at the End of the World itself has the quality of a dream: it's at once vivid and vague, easy to grasp and somehow beyond reach.
  16. The Turin Horse
    The movie is too beautiful to be described as an ordeal, but it is sufficiently intense and unyielding that when it is over, you may feel, along with awe, a measure of relief. Which may sound like a reason to stay away, but is exactly the opposite.
  17. The King of Escape
    The King of Escape is more loosely put together than “Stranger,” and, considering what happens, it’s relatively underplayed.
  18. The Proposal
    Detailing at once an art project and a rescue mission, a love triangle and an elaborate, outlandish bargain, the movie has a surface serenity that belies its fuming emotions.
  19. Unrest
    It powerfully insists on giving a voice to victims whose greatest challenge, apart from their symptoms, is surmounting a world of indifference.
  20. Western Stars
    The energy here is controlled, the mood reflective. These character-driven songs are populated by the washed-up and the run-down — an aging actor, a hitchhiker — and the shared themes are remembrance and regret.
  21. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire
    A respectful portrait of General Dallaire, now retired, who comes across as a thoughtful, resolute but profoundly shaken man, more philosopher than warrior.
  22. When I Walk
    Astonishingly, this is neither as depressing nor as arm-twistingly uplifting as you might expect. Mr. DaSilva’s experience behind a camera shows in his brisk pacing, clear narrative structure and the awareness that a story of sickness needs lighthearted distractions.
  23. Waves
    All of Shults’s stylistic brio and formal inventiveness is finally in the service of a story about love, its mutability and fragility.
  24. The Martian
    Mr. Damon’s Everyman quality (he’s our Jimmy Stewart) helps scale the story down, but what makes this epic personal is Mr. Scott’s filmmaking, in which every soaring aerial shot of the red planet is answered by the intimate landscape of a face.
  25. The Last Temptation of Christ
    despite such maladroit moments, The Last Temptation of Christ finally exerts enormous power. What emerges most memorably is its sense of absolute conviction, never more palpable than in the final fantasy sequence that removes Jesus from the cross and creates for him the life of an ordinary man.
  26. Neon Bull
    Neon Bull is a profound reflection on the intersection of the human and bestial.
  27. Nowhere Special
    The mostly low-key mode of Nowhere Special is the right one. Norton is spectacular, but little Lamont delivers one of those uncanny performances that doesn’t seem like acting, and makes you feel for the kid almost as much as his onscreen parent does.
  28. Preparation for the Next Life
    Preparation for the Next Life is all the more potent for choosing naturalism over melodrama and sensitivity over sentiment.
  29. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    What really makes Wake Up Dead Man work is that Father Jud and Benoit Blanc are two peas in a pod, when it comes right down to brass tacks.
  30. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    The man who emerges is a likable, unpretentious musical enthusiast and roll-up-your-sleeves problem-solver who apparently led a charmed life.
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