The New York Times' Scores

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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
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  1. Lapsis
    The narrative eventually loses steam, but the movie’s politics remain as low-key as its acting and as basic as its special effects. Lapsis isn’t a polemic, it’s a caricature, and all the more likable for having its claws sheathed in velvet.
  2. To All the Boys: Always and Forever
    Even at its most saccharine I can’t fault it for committing fully to what it is. I’m no fan of Valentine’s Day unless it’s a heart-shaped confection, but for those who are, “To All the Boys” is a light but satisfying dessert.
  3. Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
    “Barb and Star” offers a mixed bag of laughs, often feeling like a Frankenstein assembly of various sketches. Still, I can’t help but admire its commitment to the act, and its gloriously unhinged absurdity.
  4. There Is No I in Threesome
    As our central couple’s connection falters, the documentary evolves into an astute examination of perspective.
  5. Ruth: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words
    Though filled with valuable details, the documentary has the misfortune of arriving after countless other appraisals.
  6. Young Hearts
    Imagine mumblecore with actual mumbling and no wit, even though those lo-fi auteurs, the Duplass brothers, are executive producers.
  7. The Mauritanian
    Trapped for the most part in featureless rooms, a stellar cast — including Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley — deliver dull speeches and sift through redacted documents, brows furrowed and lips compressed.
  8. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things
    Last year, “Palm Springs” proved that the time-loop conceit from “Groundhog Day” still had some laughs in it. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things shows it’s a perfectly fine pretext for teenage treacle.
  9. Music
    This is a bizarre movie, one that parades confused ideas about care, fantasy and disability with a pride that reads as vanity. It is audacious, in the sense that making it certainly took some audacity.
  10. Breaking News in Yuba County
    One may wonder how Tate Taylor, who has overseen high-profile, conventional, ostensibly respectable Hollywood product like “The Girl on the Train” and “The Help,” came to direct this amoral, repellent bag of sick, a movie whose biggest ambition in life is to start a bidding war at a late 1990s Sundance Film Festival and then bomb at the box office. Call it water finding its own level, maybe.
  11. Dead Pigs
    It’s a tonal wild ride with eccentric characters, neon-lit settings and elaborately absurd detours. Unfortunately, the ripped-from-the-headlines meat of Dead Pigs gets lost in these affectations.
  12. Land
    Wright’s movie is ambitious (that location! that weather!), but not grandiose. Its storytelling economy helps make it credible and eventually moving.
  13. Cowboys
    The observant nature of this character drama offers Zahn in particular the opportunity to expand into new territory. He hasn’t lost the spaciness that once made him a lovable comedic sidekick, but here fatherhood endows that same charm with pathos, even tragedy.
  14. The World to Come
    Waterston and Kirby are both superb at creating characters whose attraction must be shown to grow by degrees, without overt admission. Affleck and Abbott, too, navigate a tricky dynamic, playing men who perhaps lack an understanding of their own compassion or brutishness.
  15. Judas and the Black Messiah
    Judas and the Black Messiah represents a disciplined, impassioned effort to bring clarity to a volatile moment, to dispense with the sentimentality and revisionism that too often cloud movies about the ’60s and about the politics of race. It’s fascinating in its own right, and even more so when looked at alongside other recent movies.
  16. French Exit
    Too listless to fizz and too peculiar to win us over, French Exit, directed by Azazel Jacobs, is hampered by clockwork quirkiness and disaffected dialogue.
  17. Earwig and the Witch
    For one, it’s the abundance of red herrings in this fleeting 82-minute feature; connections and relationships are implied (and a plot point about a witchy rock band flies by) but end up leading to dead ends, making the journey feel incomplete. But the most regrettable part is the animation.
  18. Son of the South
    Accepted on its terms, the film does a reasonably absorbing job of dramatizing how Zellner’s convictions strengthened, pulling him away from the security of inaction.
  19. Two of Us
    Through the use of symbolic peepholes, eavesdropping and dark rooms that provide cover for whispered assurances of devotion, Two of Us succeeds as a stealthy depiction of lesbian erotics, one that mirrors the inhibitions of a generation.
  20. Falling
    Some scenes scrape your senses like sandpaper, while others are so tender they’re almost destabilizing. Together, they shape a picture that’s tragically specific, yet more comfortable with mystery than some viewers might prefer.
  21. M.C. Escher: Journey To Infinity
    Whether anyone else, including Escher, would have done a more engaging job is debatable, but this movie, directed by Robin Lutz, offers an only intermittently satisfying look at his interests and methods. Don’t call it art; Escher felt his output hovered between art and mathematics.
  22. Malcolm & Marie
    A stylized stab at pandemic filmmaking, Malcolm & Marie, is at once mildly admirable and deeply unlikable. Beneath the film’s Old-Hollywood gleam and self-conscious sniping, serious questions are raised, only to lie fallow.
  23. Bliss
    Bliss fails to engage the senses, resulting in cinematic disappointment.
  24. Rams
    Directed with a genial breeziness by Jeremy Sims, the movie negotiates emotional downshift and uplift with confidence.
  25. Little Fish
    Once you’re swept up in Emma and Jude’s romance — it’s not hard, even though the montages veer a little too precious — the skimmed-over science matters little. This is sci-fi rooted more in feelings than fact. Its resonance is similar to “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” though it’s arguably antithetical in plot.
  26. A Glitch in the Matrix
    “A Glitch” wades only shin-deep into the complex logic that’s attached to this speculation.
  27. Palmer
    That Palmer eventually embraces Sam as an ally in misfitdom is inevitable. So is the annoyance inspired by this prosaic masculine melodrama.
  28. Just Don't Think I'll Scream
    By the time Beauvais dismisses some chestnut trees as “bland,” the movie screams nothing so much as the pained self-absorption of depression — an anguished revelation, but dead-on.
  29. Softie
    Soko gets credit for not softening Mwangi’s landing, and the outcome of the election is dropped as nearly an afterthought to his valiant efforts. But the on-the-ground campaigning and complex history could use a better shape than the film’s fits and starts.
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