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. Monrovia, Indiana
    While there’s no reason to suppose that this is Wiseman’s last movie, it doesn’t seem impossible that, at 88, he is aware of lengthening shadows and autumnal tints, of the fragility of perception and the finite nature of consciousness. Monrovia, Indiana is not precisely about any of those things, but it carries intimations of them, elegiac strains amid the doggerel of daily life.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cabaret
    Cabaret is one of those immensely gratifying imperfect works in which from beginning to end you can literally feel a movie coming to life.
  3. Peter and the Farm
    It is the film’s cosmic dimension that makes it so special.
  4. True Grit
    In some ways, much like Charles Laughton's "Night of the Hunter," which the Coens quote both musically and visually, True Grit is a parable about good and evil. Only here, the lines between the two are so blurred as to be indistinguishable, making this a true picture of how the West was won, or - depending on your view - lost.
  5. Mystery Train
    The dialogue sounds as if it had been gathered by means of microphones hidden in diners, buses, waiting rooms, restrooms, motels and park benches. Sometimes it is hilariously banal, with never a word wasted.
  6. A Hidden Life
    Franz Jägerstätter’s defiance of evil is moving and inspiring, and I wish I understood it better.
  7. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    As is customary in Mr. Baumbach’s pictures, the acting is spectacular.
  8. Hombre
    Hombre seems constantly meaning to have something vital to say, maybe about racial antagonisms, that it can't quite sputter out because it has so much to do. But in the doing of it, all the people are fine in their roles and the whole is tremendously engrossing without being important. Hombre is tough.
  9. Bigger Stronger Faster*
    Bigger, Stronger, Faster* left me convinced that the steroid scandals will abate as the drugs are reluctantly accepted as inevitable products of a continuing revolution in biotechnology. Replaceable body parts, plastic surgery, anti-depressants, Viagra and steroids are just a few of the technological advancements in a never-ending drive to make the species superhuman.
  10. The Blair Witch Project
    A nifty example of how to make something out of nothing. Nothing but imagination, and a game plan so enterprising it should elevate its creators to pinup status at film schools everywhere.
  11. I Wish
    I Wish tends toward the vaporous and not just because of its volcano; but whenever its children are on screen, lighted up with joy or dimmed by hard adult truths, the film burns bright.
  12. What Richard Did
    Every detail of What Richard Did rings true.
  13. Bending the Arc
    The men refused to be deterred by institutional rigidity, political apathy or a skeptical scientific community. Their perseverance is cheering, giving the movie a brightly buoyant tone that belies the suffering at its center and renders the sometimes distracting musical score largely unnecessary.
  14. End of the Century
    The measured ordinariness of its first section has been a sly setup for a poetic film that handles narrative as a kind of scarf dance.
  15. Housekeeping for Beginners
    In its cheerfully disordered way, “Housekeeping” tells us that families, like last-minute meals, must sometimes be created from whatever ingredients are at hand.
  16. Iris
    What is clear is that while there are several stories folded into Iris — a marriage tale, an ode to multiculturalism and a fashion spectacular — it is also about the insistent rejection of monocultural conformity.
  17. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    Mr. Abrams may be as worshipful as any Star Wars obsessive, but in The Force Awakens he’s made a movie that goes for old-fashioned escapism even as it presents a futuristic vision of a pluralistic world that his audience already lives in. He hasn’t made a film only for true believers; he has made a film for everyone (well, almost).
  18. White Riot
    One of the many things that White Riot, a documentary about RAR directed by Rubika Shah, brings home is that the world could still use more somethings against racism.
  19. Last Men in Aleppo
    This is an essential film, but it is also a terribly dispiriting one.
  20. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
    This intelligent, revolting, artistically made and entirely empty look at a murderer comes close to a cinema of pure technique. It is profoundly disturbing, even more for the questions it raises about the use of film than for the mutilated bodies that litter the screen.
  21. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Although the movie, adapted from a book by Doris Pilkington Garimara, pushes emotional buttons and simplifies its true story to give it the clean narrative sweep of an extended folk ballad, it never goes dramatically overboard.
  22. Spellbound
    Enough drama, humor and unfiltered nail-biting suspense to put all the thrill-mongering screenwriters in Hollywood to shame.
  23. Private Property
    This tense and upsetting film has more psychological depth and empathy than the comparable sensationalist fare of its time, and shudder-inducing cinematic style to spare. Private Property qualifies as a genuine rediscovery.
  24. Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound
    Documentaries about film technology, at least those that aspire to reach some portion of a mainstream audience, have to make wonkiness ingratiating. Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound, a cogent and winning picture directed by Midge Costin, does this in a variety of ways.
  25. Union
    Union is as interested in intra-union disputes as it is in the fight writ large. But the external obstacles are clear as well.
  26. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
    Mr. Gibney, who enters swinging and keeps on swinging, comes across as less interested in understanding Scientology than in exposing its secrets, which makes for a lively and watchable documentary if not an especially enlightening one.
  27. My Dog Tulip
    One of the most sophisticated dog movies ever created.
  28. White God
    In classic narrative fashion, Mr. Mundruczo works the setup like a burlesque fan dancer, teasing out the reveal bit by bit.
  29. The Century of the Self
    An unusually cerebral filmed essay that demands focus and patience from its audience as it sets about the task of unearthing a secret history of the 20th century. Adam Curtis, the film's director and writer, saves the proceedings from being overly dry with his visual wit and deft touch with archival materials.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Freaks
    Freaks is not a picture to be easily forgotten.
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