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. The Fight
    If the filmmakers succeed in wringing drama from decisions that have already come down, their efforts at character development are hit-and-miss.
  2. The Hater
    The movie is most effective in detailing how disinformation campaigns work.
  3. Radioactive
    Radioactive, a thoughtful, very watchable fictionalized portrait of Marie Curie, tries hard to nudge the halo off its subject. Given her endeavors and accolades — including two Nobel Prizes — this simple, humanizing effort proves tough but also feels necessary.
  4. City Dreamers
    The documentarian Joseph Hillel tells their stories in somewhat formulaic fashion, creating a perfectly pleasant, educational movie that is not as riveting as it should be.
  5. The Kissing Booth 2
    If The Kissing Booth, stacked with regressive relationship dynamics, is Victorian in its views, The Kissing Booth 2 progresses to the midcentury.
  6. The Grand Unified Theory of Howard Bloom
    Directed by Charlie Hoxie, "The Grand Unified Theory" is a moderately engaging documentary that credibly portrays Bloom’s indefatigability.
  7. Days of the Whale
    The cast is appealingly natural, the cinematography subtly seductive, and the Colombian pop songs on the soundtrack establish a sinuous groove.
  8. The Rental
    Featuring one of the most dissatisfying, anticlimactic endings in genre memory, this paranoid thriller (the directing debut of Dave Franco) turns an isolated seaside villa into a slaughterhouse.
  9. Retaliation
    Mostly, Retaliation accords Bloom a chance to deliver some impressive, anguished monologues, although the scenes focusing on those around him (particularly a late conversation between Montgomery and Ferns’s characters) hint at a more expansive, unrealized complexity.
  10. Fisherman's Friends
    Between predictable, commonplace plot turns and characterizations of music business types that are even more obnoxious than the norm, the movie’s straining for effect is less than ingratiating.
  11. Amulet
    This is Garai’s feature directing debut, and it is as satisfying as it is promising, despite an unfortunate wind down. She has a great eye — and a real feel for the power of silence and visual textures — but she stumbles when she explains too much.
  12. Yes, God, Yes
    Burdened by a silly R rating that may deter the very youngsters who are likely to enjoy it most, Yes, God, Yes (written and directed by Karen Maine) fights back with an appealing lead and an overwhelmingly innocent tone.
  13. Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful
    A gossipy portrait of a charmingly naughty boy whose genius is perhaps best appreciated on a second viewing with the sound off and the eyes wide open.
  14. F11 and Be There
    The film is as beautifully composed as Uzzle’s pictures. The director Jethro Waters also shot the movie, a subtle feast of light and color.
  15. Dateline—Saigon
    Despite stodgy trappings, Dateline-Saigon captures a swirl of personalities and conveys the excitement of reporting in a fast-moving, confusing and dangerous atmosphere.
  16. Fatal Affair
    There is so much recycled material in “Fatal Affair” that its carbon footprint must have been zero.
  17. The Painted Bird
    While Kosinski’s prose renders the grotesque vivid by understatement, this adaptation often seems to have little purpose beyond literal-minded visualization.
  18. Flannery
    This biographical documentary of the writer Flannery O’Connor, directed by Mark Bosco and Elizabeth Coffman, is sporadically informative. But it mostly underscores the shortcomings of the varied methods it uses.
  19. Blessed Child
    Jones’s former affiliation presumably helped with access; adherents seem to trust her, and some clips are credited to the church. It also gives her a complicated, at times surprisingly sympathetic outlook on the cult.
  20. Father Soldier Son
    Like life, it sometimes skips years, only to land on an evening that feels like an epoch.
  21. Dirt Music
    Every so often, a movie comes along that isn’t particularly good, yet somehow gets to you — even as your eyes start to roll, they can’t look away. “Dirt Music” is one of those, a strangely fascinating delivery system for so much visual beauty that its flaws scrabble to gain a purchase.
  22. The Sunlit Night
    This movie about artistic inspiration is meandering and slight, but, in a way, it provides evidence for why it’s helpful to cast actors with movie-star charisma.
  23. Never Too Late
    While it’s generally a pleasure to see stalwarts like Cromwell, Weaver and Jack Thompson (as one of the old gang) at work, one also wishes they had found, well, better work.
  24. Palm Springs
    Pain is a necessary ingredient in any successful comedy. The trick, which Barbakow and Siara seem to have mastered on their very first try, is to find the misery of the right kind and intensity, to imply tears that match the laughter.
  25. Widow of Silence
    Breathtakingly photographed by Mohammad Reza Jahanpanah, Widow of Silence is a movie with a cool head and a sharp eye — one that sees greater hope in the flamboyantly jeweled tones of a carmine head scarf than in the entrenched absurdities of a broken bureaucracy.
  26. Tito
    Tito is a better achievement in sound and visuals than plot or character. The sheer strangeness of the film may be mesmerizing at first, but even the slim 70-minute run time eventually feels tedious when so little happens.
  27. Olympia
    At times, Mavromichalis himself seems starstuck, to the extent that he can’t distinguish the disarming from the banal.
  28. Guest of Honour
    The movie is consistently seductive, and it makes lovely use of a composition by Shannon Graham that is woven into Veronica’s work as a music teacher. But several story shortcuts . . . ensure that the characters’ anguish feels more constructed than organic.
  29. We Are Little Zombies
    Smart, noisy and flashily assured, We Are Little Zombies is entirely, gleefully its own thing.
  30. Relic
    Relic deftly merges the familiar bumps and groans of the haunted-house movie with a potent allegory for the devastation of dementia.
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