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 Brink
    Fast-moving, tightly packed, at times unnervingly entertaining.
  2. One Million American Dreams
    This documentary makes a powerful case that the city’s lost dead are due more honor than what Hart Island currently extends.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Winning
    Probably the best-rounded and most appealing personalized film of this kind ever made.
  4. American Pop
    American Pop is a dazzling display of talent, nerve, ideas (old and new), passion and a marvelously free sensibility. The man may well be a genius, though that sort of pronouncement will have to wait on time.
  5. The Plagiarists
    The Plagiarists does skewer its characters, but where it goes from there is more genuinely bleak than what mere finger-pointing can achieve.
  6. My Fair Lady
    All things considered, it is the brilliance of Miss Hepburn as the Cockney waif who is transformed by Prof. Henry Higgins into an elegant female facade that gives an extra touch of subtle magic and individuality to the film.
  7. Babylon
    All of that observation in Babylon amounts to something that still feels new. You’re looking at people who, in 1980 England, were, at last, being properly, seriously seen.
  8. Booksmart
    The rapid-fire, note-perfect dialogue is punctuated with moments of brilliant conceptual whimsy: animated and underwater sequences; horror-movie jump scares; immersive theater.
  9. For Sama
    The activists of this film, including al-Kateab herself, don’t speak in the language of philosophers or politicians. Their quotidian aspirations — to build a garden, to send their children safely to school — demonstrate the brutality of the government’s response, but they also invite viewers to picture themselves in the shoes of these modest political dissidents.
  10. Lady J (Mademoiselle de Joncquières)
    Mouret manipulates our sympathies effortlessly as the story zigzags its way from there to its ultimately surprising and quite satisfying resolution.
  11. The Juniper Tree
    In watching a newly restored version, I was struck not only by Björk’s distinctive charisma at 24 years old but also by the talent of the film’s writer, director and editor, Nietzchka Keene.
  12. The Eyes of Orson Welles
    The movie intersperses observations and speculations on Welles’s life and work with long looks at his graphic pieces. These are fascinating.
  13. Buddy
    The movie is warm, observant, mildly philosophical and deeply curious about the daily and inner lives of both the people and their four-legged assistants.
  14. Roll Red Roll
    A tough but essential watch, Roll Red Roll documents how a sexual assault in a declining Appalachian town became an international cause célèbre. Shots of near-empty streets and an abandoned steel mill provide a melancholy frame for behavior that seems horrifyingly incomprehensible.
  15. Blow-Up
    This is a fascinating picture, which has something real to say about the matter of personal involvement and emotional commitment in a jazzed-up, media-hooked-in world so cluttered with synthetic stimulations that natural feelings are overwhelmed.
  16. Medium Cool
    A film of tremendous visual impact, a kind of cinematic Guernica, a picture of America in the process of exploding into fragmented bits of hostility, suspicion, fear and violence.
  17. Satan & Adam
    The blues seep into every scene of Satan & Adam, a gritty yet lovely documentary. And even after the songs stop, the music’s bittersweet emotions linger.
  18. If the Dancer Dances
    As Wechsler allows rehearsal scenes to play out at length, the perfectionism of dancer-to-dancer lessons becomes improbably poignant.
  19. Hesburgh
    Hesburgh is consistently smart about its subject. It makes a convincing case that the priest was one of a handful of whites in the civil rights movement who understood the systemic nature of racism in the United States.
  20. Burning Cane
    Burning Cane is short and difficult. It does not aspire to entertain. Its realism is shot through with a constant dull ache.
  21. The River and the Wall
    The River and the Wall” comes on as innocent and glossy as a travelogue, but its scenic delights are the sugar coating on a passionate and spectacularly photographed political message.
  22. Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
    The political intelligence and matter-of-fact feminism that emerge in this portrait are among its most intriguing aspects. Her cleareyed, down-to-earth thoughts on her profession, her family and American culture (musical and otherwise) make her someone you want to know better.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
    In its forthright dealing with the play, this becomes one of the most scathingly honest American films ever made.
  24. 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Birdman of Alcatraz
    A thoughtful yet powerful portrait that cleaves to the heart and mind despite its omissions.
  26. The Wild Child
    Unlike any other film Truffaut has ever made, yet only Truffaut could have made it. It is a lovely, pure film. And it may be a classic.
  27. Atlantics
    It testifies to the variety and vitality of politically alert genre filmmaking. It’s a suspenseful, sensual, exciting movie, and therefore a deeply haunting one as well.
  28. Les Misérables
    Ly shows command of staging and shooting throughout, simulating documentary form while maintaining a tight grip on narrative coherence.
  29. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    This is less a chronicle of forbidden desire than an examination of how desire works. Like a lost work of 18th-century literature, it is at once ardent and rigorous, passionate and philosophical.
  30. Sorry We Missed You
    There’s no way for Loach to have gone smaller. When the movie’s over, you have, indeed, witnessed a tragedy, just not the usual kind. Nobody dies. No one goes to prison (there is one police-station visit unlike any I’ve seen). But life: that’s the tragedy, what it takes to get by, what it takes be just a little bit happy — for one lousy meal.
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