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. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
    Wrenching and at times suffocating, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a howl of maternal desperation spiked with jagged humor.
  2. Tempestad
    It’s an artful and lyrical assembly.
  3. Barbarosa
    The best western in a long while is Barbarosa, a film that uses one American legend, Willie Nelson, to create another.
  4. Frankenstein
    Lush, melodramatic, sweepingly romantic and achingly emotional, it is a tale of fathers and sons, of lovers and outcasts, of men as the true monsters.
  5. Sorry to Bother You
    Mr. Riley isn’t constructing yet another postmodern playhouse out of borrowings and allusions. He’s building a raft, and steering it straight into the foaming rapids of racism, economic injustice and cultural conflict.
  6. The Case Against 8
    The Case Against 8 functions as a valuable record of the nuts-and-bolts conference room side of advocacy — an aspect of civil rights work not often seen on screen.
  7. Midnight Run
    Mr. De Niro and Mr. Grodin are lunatic delights, which is somewhat more than can be said for the movie, whose mechanics keep getting in the way of the performances. [20 July 1988, p.C15]
    • The New York Times
  8. The Devil Came on Horseback
    Brutal, urgent, devastating -- the documentary The Devil Came on Horseback demands to be seen as soon as possible and by as many viewers as possible.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Teza
    Has all the hallmarks of a career summation -- and early on it seems fated to collapse beneath the weight of its ambitions. Instead, it soars, thanks to Mr. Gerima’s bracingly direct storytelling.
  10. A Season in France
    While the story plays a bit with the notion of the supernatural, the spirit foregrounded here is more tangible: an ominous sense of restlessness and curtailed dreams.
  11. Those Who Remained
    Those Who Remained leaves much unsaid about their pasts, sometimes at the risk of seeming coy (the word “Jewish” is never spoken). But Hajduk and Szoke are strong performers.
  12. The Human Factor
    The Human Factor presents a cogent and involving view of the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, mainly from 1991 until the end of Bill Clinton’s first term, told through the recollections of United States negotiators charged with brokering a peace.
  13. Moby Dick
    This is the third time Melville's story has been put upon the screen. There is no need for another, because it cannot be done better, more beautifully or excitingly again.
  14. The Great Lillian Hall
    Like many of the best golden-age melodramas, this HBO film fully commits to both unabashed emotion and a complicated female lead, a role filled by Jessica Lange with a finely tuned mix of showmanship and nuance.
  15. All That Heaven Allows
    Solid and sensible drama plainly had to give way to outright emotional bulldozing and a paving of easy clichés.
  16. 1917
    A carefully organized and sanitized war picture from Sam Mendes that turns one of the most catastrophic episodes in modern times into an exercise in preening showmanship.
  17. A Simple Life
    Ms. Hui, a rare successful female director in the Hong Kong film industry, drew her story from real events, and the movie retains a tonic flavor of the everyday: its drama unfolds simply, without explosive moments but not without emotion. She and her two excellent leads keep the film buoyant.
  18. Kedi
    The movie is replete with ingeniously constructed mini-narratives, including a turf war. The mesmerizing score by Kira Fontana, interspersed with well-chosen Turkish pop, is a real asset.
  19. Love Exposure
    Merging the sacred and the profane, the bloody and the batty, Love Exposure tunnels into serious topics - warped parenting, sexual intolerance and the way religious cults enslave damaged souls - with a hilariously blasphemous shovel.
  20. Waste Land
    "We are not pickers of garbage; we are pickers of recyclable materials," Tião, an impoverished Brazilian catadore, or trash picker, declares to a talk-show host in Lucy Walker's inspiring documentary Waste Land.
  21. Goldstone
    Its sociopolitical concerns — primarily around indigenous land rights — are muted and muddled by a script that favors manly grunting and moody looks over clarifying dialogue. Riven with racism and sharp bursts of violence, Goldstone nevertheless has a rough, desolate beauty.
  22. Limbo
    Sen, who also handled both the black-and-white cinematography and the editing, has a terrific eye for shot composition and sets a deliberate pace that feels implacable rather than merely slow.
  23. Hitler's Hollywood
    The most charged implication of Hitler’s Hollywood is that artistry enabled the Third Reich.
  24. Gaslight
    Prepare yourselves rather for a lengthy and restless stretch on tenterhooks.
  25. The Substance
    The sharpest critique isn’t about bodies, but about the way we’ve trained ourselves to look at those bodies, and the effect that has on our own. The movie is, appropriately enough, a mirror, and our discomfort reveals our own hidden biases and fears about ourselves.
  26. Murderous Maids
    Ms. Testud's performance, which earned her a César, the French Oscar, for most promising actress, is the source of the movie's lingering, troubling power.
  27. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
    Morris, instead of evoking the solemnity that surrounds most films that touch on the Holocaust, has directed Mr. Death as the blackest of comedies.
  28. Last Orders
    Like finding that perfect stage of moderate drunkenness in which the senses are sharpened rather than dulled, and time passes with leisurely grace.
  29. Ça commence aujourd'hui
    Strikes a difficult and necessary moral balance, refusing to succumb to hopelessness but also refusing to rule it out.
  30. Son frère
    Stringent, clinical and almost unbearably moving.
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