The New York Times' Scores

For 20,278 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:
20278 movie reviews
  1. Dad humor abounds in Family Camp, a vanishingly mild comedy that resembles other films about parents and kids bumbling in the wilderness
  2. What could have been an urgent inquiry into the systems enabling sex criminals becomes something more pedestrian — a stylized replay of a game of cat and mouse.
  3. The cinematography is often grainy, and occasionally Banua-Simon’s choice of interview subjects feels unfocused or repetitive. But there is tremendous educational and moral value in his overview of the history of Kauai.
  4. Unfortunately, the script is too disjointed to keep its own complex characters afloat. Little is revealed as the plot bounces from one climax to another, making any eventual bloodshed feel exhausting and unearned.
  5. The film’s intention may have been to highlight the negotiator’s achievement, but it appears that it was public pressure, as much as his influence, that prevented more bloodshed.
  6. Its terse David and Goliath conflict doesn’t yield satisfyingly punchy results.
  7. The Valet is an earnest crowd pleaser that unabashedly celebrates the bonds of a Latino family in a tight-knit neighborhood with rom-com aplomb.
  8. Enigmatic and imperfect, but nonetheless absorbing and consistently unsettling, Cordelia offers a haunting visualization of a breaking-apart psyche.
  9. At once tragedy and farce, it breathes new life into a story as old as civilization.
  10. Men
    The movie, an uneasy amalgam of horror and allegory, full of creepy, gory effects and literary and mythological allusions, amounts to a sustained and specific indictment of the titular gender.
  11. At its grungy heart, Alessandro Celli’s Mondocane is about the dissolution of a friendship. Yet this cynical, near-future crime thriller, with its Hunger Games morality and Mad Max aesthetic, is too busy glamorizing cruelty to allow its central relationship to resonate.
  12. Its criticisms of patriarchal authority, bureaucratic corruption and superstition in rural India are sharp and unsparing, but its political themes are embedded in a humanism that is at once expansive and specific. The characters don’t deliver a message; their lives are the message.
  13. A wry take on the material that combines animation and live-action comedy, the movie has some of the hip flair and anarchic meta-humor of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” as well as an irreverent, self-referential attitude that’s rather appealing.
  14. True, its hero is a philandering middle-aged novelist; he has an affair with a divine younger woman; and there’s even an imaginary trial where said novelist stands before a jury of women accusing him of misogyny. But, if you can tolerate these passé indulgences, there’s also something slyly compelling about this ethereal, pillow-talk-heavy drama.
  15. Thanks to some good filmmaking decisions, Emergency is rife with tart observations about campus life.
  16. Fellowes manages to navigate Downton Abbey to charm both reactionaries and revolutionaries.
  17. This movie brushes aside a lot of things — the most shocking thing about it is how soggily noncommittal it is.
  18. The film’s early snark turns as cloying and insincere as the cultural doublespeak that it parodies. By the final act, its dialogue is so burdened by inspirational maxims about personal authenticity that it feels as though the script has been hijacked by yearbook quotes.
  19. It is the siblings — their anguish and their anger, as well as the compassion they extend to one another — that drive the narrative.
  20. Excess is the sine qua non of porn, so that’s expected. What is more surprising — and welcome — is how Thyberg engages feminist issues like a woman’s agency while making you laugh, freaking you out and prompting you to squirm.
  21. Heymann situates the notion of celebrity in the context of not just performance and gay culture but also familial intimacy, with striking detail.
  22. The three-part scope is ambitious, but Foxhole is a film made on a very small scale.
  23. Skillfully merging menace and sweetness (when Anna begins to speak, her parents’ delight is incredibly touching), The Innocents constructs a superbly eerie moral landscape, one that the children (all of whom are fantastic) must learn to navigate.
  24. If this spin on the tale is not quite diverting enough to justify its existence, the movie, directed by Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, is at least not a soulless exercise.
  25. The ebullient history — which also cites on-site food tents as a mind-blowing component of the fest’s appeal — becomes tearful when Hurricane Katrina decimates New Orleans in 2005.
  26. Operation Mincemeat is overall light on remorse and far more interested in intrigue, both political and romantic.
  27. Frammartino connects the physical with the metaphysical. The world as he renders it is an anthology of concrete objects and unrepeatable moments that are somehow infused with abstract, even spiritual meanings.
  28. When Montana Story works, you are effortlessly drawn into a world — which allows you to go with the easygoing, realist groove — even as you’re taking stock of the artifice and waiting for the hammer to fall.
  29. The film’s still, square images feel so much like paintings that any stray movement — the smoke rising in spirals from a mosquito coil, or a palm tree swaying in the breeze — can seem like magic, a picture come to life.
  30. Michael John Warren’s film is a sure-handed blend of making-of explainer, theater-kid scrapbook and jukebox documentary, doling out hits from its theatrical run (through clips) and the reunion.

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