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. Destry Rides Again
    A bit of the old West with a good bit of the old Dietrich in it; a tightly written, capitally directed show, with perfectly grand supporting performances.
  2. Son of the White Mare
    Son of the White Mare isn’t just old hat; the simultaneously geometric and fluid animation renders each mythic trope totally new.
  3. Ghost Tropic
    Beguiles and fascinates on several levels.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Life with Father
    All that the fabulous play had to offer in the way of charm, comedy, humor and gentle pathos is beautifully realized in the handsomely Technicolored picture.
  5. Honeymoon in Vegas
    Honeymoon in Vegas is a virtually nonstop scream of benign delirium, pop entertainment as revivifying as anything you're likely to see this year. It's a romantic farce in which the explosion of the epically earnest and funny central situation creates shock waves that leave no person or thing untouched. Even the film's bit players and extras are funny.
  6. Isadora's Children
    Isadora’s Children is made with such unusual delicacy that it may elude the grasp of audiences who demand things such as, well, plot. But its sensitivity is rare and valuable.
  7. Buoyancy
    There is evil and it helps keep the world running, our clothes and food coming. This is the greatest, most difficult, most unspeakable violence laid bare in Rathjen’s measured, insistently political movie.
  8. Notturno
    The past two decades of documentary film have produced many anatomies of history that attempt to summarize several millenniums, but Rosi’s borderless tableaus bring out another kind of truth in faces, places and pure feeling.
  9. Gather
    Rawal covers a substantial amount of ground and deftly balances the dense material without losing sight of the mission driving the bigger story: Healing from generational trauma sometimes starts with just one person.
  10. Residue
    Gerima’s challenging, engrossing filmmaking style is measured, simultaneously realistic and impressionistic. What’s out of the frame is often as important, if not more important, than what’s in the frame.
  11. The Dark and the Wicked
    Pitiless in its intent, and hopeless in its sense of sorrowful dereliction, The Dark and the Wicked fully earns its horrifically distressing final scenes.
  12. City Hall
    City Hall runs four and a half mostly engrossing hours, making it one of Wiseman’s longest. That sounds daunting, but I could have watched hours more of people simply talking to one another in auditoriums and across conference-room tables.
  13. Wife of a Spy
    Wife of a Spy is something like linear narrative perfection, with every scene perfectly calibrated.
  14. Enemies of the State
    Kennebeck weaves uncertainty into the formal design, staging re-enactments mingled with original audio, for instance. The movie is a spoiler deathtrap, but the questions it raises are fascinating.
  15. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    This film rests on the fact that Mother Earth is always being called on by other worlds in the forms of comets, meteorites and asteroids — and it’s about as transportive as documentaries get.
  16. Limbo
    Limbo, written and directed by a ferociously talented filmmaker, Ben Sharrock, takes an insinuating, poetic and often wryly funny approach. And it’s both heartbreaking and heartlifting.
  17. MLK/FBI
    The result is at once suspenseful, visually engrossing and intellectually bracing. It also raises urgent, sometimes uncomfortable questions about power, privacy and the ethical challenges of examining the past.
  18. Shiva Baby
    It’s rare for a film to simultaneously balance such wildly divergent tones, to interweave big laughs with gut-wrenching discomfort, but Seligman pulls it off.
  19. What the Constitution Means to Me
    Schreck succeeds in widening her autobiographical play into a paean for basic fairness: The American Constitution, admired as it is, fails to protect all of us from violence and discrimination.
  20. Small Axe: Alex Wheatle
    A film in which violence and stillness alternate with queasy regularity.
  21. Small Axe: Mangrove
    A history lesson doesn’t have to be a lecture, and at its best, Mangrove, with its clear and painful implications for the present, conveys the sense of a world in motion, as the possibility of something new comes into being.
  22. Small Axe: Education
    McQueen, who attended one of these schools, uses this small, hopeful story to illustrate how one generation, by means of an ingenious workaround to bigotry, fought to secure the future of the next.
  23. Small Axe: Red, White and Blue
    Some of Red, White and Blue is hard to watch, but the film is eloquent on how an institution will resist change, perhaps especially from inside its own walls.
  24. David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet
    The film’s grand achievement is that it positions its subject as a mediator between humans and the natural world. Life cycles on, and if we make the right choices, ruin can become regrowth.
  25. Oliver Sacks: His Own Life
    While the movie steers around the details of how post-fame Sacks became something of a brand, it beautifully presents a portrait of his compassion and bravery.
  26. The Human Voice
    Almodóvar’s sense of cinema design — the décor simulates a luxe apartment and lays it bare as a soundstage illusion — is acutely keyed to Swinton’s performance here, which projects mercurial emotion with Swiss watch precision.
  27. They Were Expendable
    It is nostalgic, warm with sentiment and full of fight in every foot. It is hard to commend any actor above the rest. Each plays his part well.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mister Roberts
    It is loaded to the gunwales with screamingly funny scenes which, in several instances, are visual improvements on the play.
  29. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a powerful and pungent reminder of the necessity of art, of its sometimes terrible costs and of the preciousness of the people, living and dead, with whom we share it.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Tale of Two Cities
    For more than two hours it crowds the screen with beauty and excitement, sparing nothing in its recital of the Englishmen who were caught up in the blood and terror of the French Revolution and of Sydney Carton, who gave his life for his friends.
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