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. Lily Topples the World
    No arguments, frustrations or consequential disappointments mar the film’s unvaryingly upbeat tone. This leaves us with a movie that feels more like a marketing tool for her self-designed brand of dominoes than a nuanced portrait of an unusual talent.
  2. Candyman
    It’s easy to shock viewers with splatter but the old gut-and-run gets awfully boring awfully fast. Far better is the slow creep, the horror that teases and then threatens. The dread inexorably builds in Candyman, which snaps into focus after Anthony learns of the boogeyman.
  3. Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac
    The new movie is less cohesive than “Biggie and Tupac,” and Broomfield is not suited to documentaries with willing subjects.
  4. Sweet Girl
    For this action film, the director Brian Andrew Mendoza favors a utilitarian style. His color palette leans toward grays, blues and browns. His fight scenes are not flashy, or even particularly memorable, but they are clear, effectively conveying the necessary information about whose fist has connected with whose face.
  5. The Smartest Kids in the World
    The Smartest Kids in the World aspires to offer a study of teaching methods worldwide, but the documentary (on Discovery+) contains little rigor. It’s a dippy lecture in motion.
  6. The Protégé
    Kudos to Q, though, for a performance anchored in classy disdain for the baloney around her.
  7. On Broadway
    On Broadway sure knows how to work a theater-lover’s heart.
  8. Wildland
    So committed to maintaining an enigmatically sinister atmosphere, the film fails to build out the many compelling issues it raises about toxic masculinity and familial gaslighting. Nevertheless, some inspired confrontations, and a commanding performance by Sidse Babett Knudsen, who plays the hot-and-cold matriarch, Bodil, makes “Wildland” an absorbing and highly watchable psychodrama.
  9. Demonic
    Flat acting, risible dialogue, a witless story — sometimes when a movie hits this trifecta so completely, it engenders a feeling of disreputable pleasure. It’s bad, and you know it, and maybe the filmmakers know it too.
  10. The Outsider
    What’s especially peculiar about the focus on Shulan is that, in other respects, The Outsider is an ensemble piece, distributing screen time among a half a dozen people planning for the museum’s opening.
  11. Flag Day
    Penn gives him a vivid, wheedling desperation that’s weirdly moving, and the younger Penn has clearly inherited the emotional expressiveness of her mother, Robin Wright. Maybe that’s why Flag Day feels as much a love letter from Penn to his own daughter as the story of someone else’s.
  12. Reminiscence
    Highfalutin, lightly enjoyable mush, Reminiscence is one of those speculative fictions that are at once undernourished and overcooked. It makes no sense (despite all the explaining), but it draws you in with genre beats, pretty people and the professional polish of its machined parts.
  13. Under the Volcano
    Almost 40 years later, it’s hilarious to see Stewart Copeland speak of Sting with still-fresh feelings of exasperation, irritation and admiration. Fans of Elton John will find the manic work ethic he applied to the album “Too Low for Zero” fascinating.
  14. PAW Patrol: The Movie
    Yes, the computer-generated colors, overseen by the director Cal Brunker, are bright, the pups have soulful eyes . . . and the story line . . . is, um, a story line.
  15. The Night House
    As the screenplay teases natural explanations for these sinister goings-on — Extreme grief? Nightmares? Mental illness? — Bruckner maintains a death grip on the film’s mood while his cinematographer, Elisha Christian, turns the home’s reflective surfaces into shape-shifting puzzle pieces.
  16. Cryptozoo
    Cryptozoo stands out as an aesthetically ambitious undertaking, seducing viewers with its hypnotizing hand-drawn animation and John Carroll Kirby’s pulsing electronic score.
  17. In the Same Breath
    If In the Same Breath — the title becomes more resonant with each new scene and shock — were simply about China and its handling (mishandling) of the pandemic, it would be exemplary. But the story that she tells is larger and deeper than any one country because this is a story that envelops all of us, and it is devastating.
  18. Beckett
    Washington is a likable actor and easy on the eyes, but the character is unproductively one-dimensional and so is the performance, which remains reactive and opaque. Here, at least, he can’t turn an underconceptualized character into one whom you either care about or want to watch gasping and grimacing for several hours.
  19. Usedom: A Clear View of the Sea
    Shaping personal and geographical history into sun-drenched dollops, the director Heinz Brinkmann fashions a charmingly quirky guide to his island home.
  20. Respect
    Respect succeeds in doing exactly what is expected of it. You may argue with this or that filmmaking choice and regret its overly smooth edges, but it does give you a sense of Franklin as a historical figure, a crossover success story and a full-throttle, fur-draped diva.
  21. Don't Breathe 2
    Don’t Breathe 2 is plenty lively, full of violence and action, but a rancid narrative (and some seriously terrible dialogue) overpowers the script.
  22. Materna
    As it stands, the glue uniting these women of different ethnicities and backgrounds reads like a failed attempt to carve a more ambitious meaning out of individual stories already brimming with possibility.
  23. Homeroom
    Like a diploma, it’s easy to imagine how the rewards of this carefully observed documentary could accrue with a little time.
  24. The Lost Leonardo
    It’s a dizzying tale. And whether or not you believe “Salvator Mundi” to be a real Leonardo, it’s ultimately a disgusting one.
  25. Days
    Tsai’s motives for stretching his shots become clear after a while, and the film builds an uncanny mood.
  26. Ema
    Whether a melodramatic comment on art and anarchy, or a wild experiment in toxic maternalism, the film feels like a fever that just won’t break.
  27. The East
    The details may be novel — even eye-opening for some — but this story of white guilt and brutality feels mighty old.
  28. The Meaning of Hitler
    The Meaning of Hitler takes a multifaceted, often counterintuitive approach to examining the underpinnings of fascism.
  29. Not Going Quietly
    It is a warm and generous portrait, but the film lacks its central organizer’s propulsive shrewdness.
  30. Searching for Mr. Rugoff
    As someone who grew up going to some of the theaters Rugoff once ran — which included Cinema I and II and the Beekman, among others — I got the warm-and-fuzzies from seeing the love here for moviegoing and exhibition, which he goosed with gonzo showmanship.
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