The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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:
  1. Positive: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Butter
    For all its ache and churning emotions, “Butter” winds up being little more than a meager “Afterschool Special.”
  2. Servants
    Ostrochovsky often begins shots with characters frozen in place for several seconds before they launch into action, as if they were chess pieces moved by God across the bare lines of the seminary’s crumbling stone architecture.
  3. Friends and Strangers
    While the pieces don’t necessarily fit in obvious ways, that’s presumably the point — and part of what makes Friends and Strangers so singular.
  4. Family Squares
    Filmed during quarantine in 2020, Family Squares uses the communication tools of the pandemic era to deliver a film with the intimacy of a home movie, while still exploring the chaos and limitations of technology.
  5. No Exit
    No Exit drops an arsenal of twists and rug-pulls at a machine gun’s pace, though Power, the director, doesn’t quite know how to milk the tension, and the perfunctory script (written by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari) tries and fails to give the events a greater resonance.
  6. Big Gold Brick
    The title of this perfectly well-appointed production is apt: Big Gold Brick looks all right but it truly just sits there.
  7. The Burning Sea
    We get little more than a bland romance, smoothly professional special effects and a story that’s finally too predictable to raise the heart rate.
  8. Creation Stories
    “Stories” does have a handful of funny and affecting scenes. But it’s most interesting when McGee, after sobering up, makes an ill-advised alliance with Tony Blair.
  9. Hellbender
    While the result is a mostly-compelling tale of matriarchal megalomania, occasionally this group composition feels more like a jumble.
  10. Three Months
    The contrast between Caleb and Estha remains the movie’s greatest asset. Their relationship grants room for the audience to witness and appreciate their differences, not just culturally, but as fully drawn individuals.
  11. Mr. Bachmann and His Class
    This isn’t a heroic-teacher drama about idealism in the face of adversity. It’s an acknowledgment of the hard work of learning, and the magic of simple decency.
  12. Strawberry Mansion
    This is a movie about letting the mind roam.
  13. Cyrano
    From the moment Cyrano enters the action, his charisma and intelligence are on splendid display, and Dinklage — jaunty, melancholy, sly — takes possession of the movie. But that means that the argument on which the drama depends is over before it has even begun.
  14. Studio 666
    No one tries for anything mightier than put-on dumbness because that’s the outer limit of where the acting, writing (by Jeff Buhler and Rebecca Hughes) and directing (by BJ McDonnell) can take this premise. It’s fun, nonetheless, to catalog everybody’s imperviousness to embarrassment.
  15. Inspector Ike
    It’ll work best with viewers whose funny bones are of the dry variety.
  16. The Automat
    If anything, The Automat seeks to burnish the mystique — it won’t be hijacked by social politics even if the company’s stance in such matters appeared to be the right one. The movie opts for a starry, top-down vantage.
  17. Fistful of Vengeance
    Without tactical, philosophical or emotional grounding, the battle scenes don’t land with any cinematic force.
  18. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    In David Blue Garcia’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre the blade is more active than ever. But while Leatherface, the homicidal head case who fashions masks from the skin of his victims, might be busier, his ability to scare has waned considerably.
  19. Uncharted
    At least give Sony credit for recycling. That is the best that can be said for its nitwit treasure-hunt movie Uncharted, an amalgam of clichés that were already past their sell-by date when Nicolas Cage plundered the box office in Disney’s “National Treasure” series.
  20. Downfall: The Case Against Boeing
    It is likely to leave viewers shaken, and it is always comprehensible, even in sequences that illustrate what the pilots saw in the cockpit.
  21. Ted K
    The film is a tad reductive, leaning too heavily on currently fashionable explanations for why lonely white men resort to violence. But Stone makes up for it with some magnificently eerie moments.
  22. A Banquet
    You’re likely to leave this film starving for answers, but that hunger can be just as stimulating as it is burdensome.
  23. Taste
    There’s something here. It’s just undercooked. The cinematic philosophy around these minimalist hallucinations comes down to whether the images ought to amount to anything, as they always do with Weerasethakul and almost always with Reygadas.
  24. For Lucio
    This isn’t “Lucio for Beginners” by any means. Nor is it a greatest-hits anthology or a “behind the music” tell-all. It’s a tribute and an invitation to further research.
  25. Dog
    Dog is unabashedly sentimental. A movie about a dog and a soldier could hardly be otherwise. Luckily, Tatum’s self-deprecating charm and Carolin’s script keep the story on the tolerable side of maudlin.
  26. Icahn: The Restless Billionaire
    The perspective — while producing something eminently watchable — may strike some viewers as old-fashioned and incomplete.
  27. Oscar Peterson: Black + White
    “Black + White” does feature plenty of Peterson’s music, including several cover renditions performed in tribute for the film by a contemporary ensemble. But at almost every opportunity, Avrich undermines these numbers by cutting to one of an endless lineup of talking heads, usually to repeat predictable platitudes about Peterson’s brilliance.
  28. Somewhere with No Bridges
    Even as Frank keeps questioning and exploring, Madeiras and the full sweep of his life remain as out of focus as this documentary, an essay without a coherent thesis.
  29. Playground
    This is the first feature from the writer-director Laura Wandel, and it’s a knockout, as flawlessly constructed as it is harrowing.
  30. Tall Girl 2
    The plot is scattershot; the drama ant-size.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »