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. The Public
    Most egregiously, Gabrielle Union plays a TV news reporter determined to portray the protest as a hostage situation. At the film’s nadir, Stuart, on the phone with her during a broadcast, stops making his case and begins quoting from “The Grapes of Wrath.”
  2. Storm Boy
    Storm Boy tries to present itself as a modern fable, where the lessons learned relate directly to present-day concerns over the environment, industrialization and the marginalization of indigenous cultures. But these themes come across as didactic rather than moving.
  3. Peterloo
    Leigh’s narrative is touched by the literary spirit of the later 19th century. Peterloo has the sweep of Tolstoy and the bustle of Dickens.
  4. High Life
    Too often the ideas here, visual and otherwise, feel haphazard — outer and inner space, Pattinson’s head, sexual taboo, apocalypse now or maybe then — more like material for a vision board than a fully realized vision.
  5. Pet Sematary
    But when they settle into a groove that aligns with the novel’s, the movie delivers great unsettling jolts that approximate the power of King’s vision.
  6. Shazam!
    It’s a nice change of pace for a big-screen mega-comic, if not a revolutionary shift.
  7. The Best of Enemies
    Rather than illuminating the politics of the present by examining the struggles of the past, Bissell lurches from folksy comedy to clattering melodrama, producing the opposite of enlightenment. To quote an old protest song: When will we ever learn?
  8. Wall
    Imperiously wringing his hands at both sides of the conflict, Hare never brings his observations together in a satisfying conclusion (not that any was likely, in just 80 minutes).
  9. The Legend of Cocaine Island
    The director (2014’s “Little Hope Was Arson”) can lay it on thick with the comic scene setups and James Bond-like soundtrack. Then again, this underlines the silliness of Rodney Hyden’s odyssey.
  10. Super Deluxe
    Super Deluxe, though, runs three hours, and Kumararaja loses his way in the draggy, overlong second act.
  11. A Vigilante
    Daggar-Nickson gestures in certain directions, but for the most part she avoids deeper, troubling questions about retribution and violence. Instead, she concentrates on the genre basics, as in the movie’s admirably hard-core final face-off.
  12. Tigerland
    Tigerland falls into a common trap of advocacy documentaries, which is to inform on an urgent issue — preserving a species — without a particularly urgent cinematic narrative to match it.
  13. Slut in a Good Way
    In satisfying fashion, Slut in a Good Way recognizes the potential for cruelty that exists as teenagers experiment and learn through sex, but its portrait of adolescence never feels less than loving.
  14. The Last
    As the impossible Claire, the longtime character actor Rebecca Schull (a 90-year-old playing 92) is spectacular. Her character is lucid in her awfulness, and she almost never shuts up, relating endless anecdotes that don’t just force her family to face awful truths, but rub their noses in them.
  15. The Chaperone
    Despite a thoroughly modern central character, this impeccably costumed, wishy-washy period piece feels like it emerged from a PBS storage trunk, wrapped in tissue paper and reeking of mothballs.
  16. The Burial Of Kojo
    The Burial of Kojo is a near-virtuoso work, a feast of emotion, nuance and beauty, and a startling feature directing debut.
  17. Working Woman
    Despite its surface-level placidity, the Israeli feature Working Woman unfolds like a psychological thriller — a procedural that, as it tightens its grip, captures how workplace sexual harassment slowly takes over one woman’s life.
  18. The Beach Bum
    What The Beach Bum celebrates as transgression is pure tedium. What it takes for divine lunacy is frat house doggerel. The booze flows freely. The women are topless and ornamental. The cars and boats are fast and expensive. There’s nothing much worth writing about.
  19. The Brink
    Fast-moving, tightly packed, at times unnervingly entertaining.
  20. Dumbo
    Ho-hum until it takes a turn toward the fascinatingly weird, the movie is a welcome declaration of artistic independence for Burton...Watching him cut loose (more recklessly than his flying baby elephant) is by far the most unexpected pleasure of this movie, which dusts off the 1941 animated charmer with exhilaratingly demented spirit.
  21. The Dirt
    Plays like an ill-advised remake of “This Is Spinal Tap” — one in which all the laughs are unintentional.
  22. Triple Threat
    At times, the film’s demand for teamwork precludes satisfying payoffs.
  23. Maze
    Yet underneath the plotting and internecine tussles of the would-be escapees lurks something much more interesting: the story of a seduction.
  24. Out of Blue
    Out of Blue botches the source material’s story, misses its mordant humor and inverts its despairing core. Much of this is the filmmaker’s prerogative. But “Out of Blue” doesn’t strike out only as an adaptation. What it offers on its own is tepid and predictable.
  25. Roll Red Roll
    A tough but essential watch, Roll Red Roll documents how a sexual assault in a declining Appalachian town became an international cause célèbre. Shots of near-empty streets and an abandoned steel mill provide a melancholy frame for behavior that seems horrifyingly incomprehensible.
  26. Sunset
    While Nemes’s near-subjective technique can generate genuine tension, it more often yields anxious tedium.
  27. Hotel Mumbai
    It reduces the randomness of real-life bloodshed to the slick thrills of a popcorn movie. And after the mosque attacks in Christchurch, which led the film’s distributor in New Zealand to suspend the movie’s release there, its savagery is especially difficult to take.
  28. Ramen Shop
    A drama from the Singaporean director Eric Khoo that also demonstrates the power of Instagrammable cuisine to spice up an otherwise straightforward, sentimental film.
  29. Total Dhamaal
    The moral seems as tacked on as the villain. But it’s a sweet thought and not entirely out of keeping with a movie that for all its crassness, comic and commercial, is basically good-spirited.
  30. Us
    A vibrant, appealing screen presence, Nyong’o brings a tremendous range and depth of feeling to both characters, who she individualizes with such clarity and lapidary detail that they aren’t just distinct beings; they feel as if they were being inhabited by different actors.
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