The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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: 9,377 out of 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. Bad Reputation
    The movie chronicles music industry tales of glory and failure. These are dishy, but more interesting is Ms. Jett’s rock ‘n’ roll heart. The stories of how she mentored younger bands are moving.
  2. Cruise
    Contrary to his delicious downer of a first film, the terrific “Big Fan,” Mr. Siegel doesn’t venture into risky areas here. He’s content to have these characters hang out in cars or at a diner while chewing the scenery and checking their beepers. If you came of age in the 1980s, that’s enough to enjoy.
  3. Free Solo
    Despite a somewhat soft middle section, Free Solo is an engaging study of a perfect match between passion and personality.
  4. Smallfoot
    The movie, directed by Karey Kirkpatrick, has just enough wit and visual invention to get by. (The “Bad Santa” team of John Requa and Glenn Ficarra are among those credited with the story.) But for all the hints of darkness around its edges, the film is ultimately like its heroes: cuddly, cute and harmless.
  5. MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A.
    The documentary elicits some viewer indignation on her behalf, but overall, it’s not a very inspired piece of work. While it depicts M.I.A.’s bristling at being called a terrorist advocate, it never wholly clarifies her specific political aims.
  6. Scaffolding
    Rife with heavy-handed metaphors — and discussions of metaphors, as befits a movie about a young man studying literature — Scaffolding seems somewhat torn when it comes to telegraphing its own intentions. Its ambiguities of character take a back seat to a trite upshot.
  7. The Old Man & the Gun
    How much intensity and suspense can you drain from a movie about cops and robbers without having the thing collapse into anecdote and whimsy? The Old Man & the Gun kind of does just that, but it’s hard to mind too much.
  8. Hold the Dark
    The movie keeps moving, the story keeps flowing, but these images — which feel suspended between cinema and still photography — create a pause in the action that your anxious imagination can’t help but fret over. That’s especially true because Mr. Saulnier’s images are often in service of spooky, blood-drenched tales.
  9. Night School
    The plot zigs and zags and sometimes accelerates in the direction of genuine hilarity...only to downshift into sloppy, easy jokes and gags.
  10. Colette
    Colette is an origin story, a tale of metamorphosis rather than of already formed greatness. What interests Mr. Westmoreland is how a self-described country girl became a woman of the world, a transformation that in its deeper, more intimately mysterious registers remains out of reach of this movie and of the hard-working Ms. Knightley.
  11. Call Her Ganda
    Call Her Ganda (“ganda” means “beautiful” in Tagalog) remains commendable for its focus on the case, and for its insistence that the crime against Ms. Laude not be forgotten.
  12. Assassination Nation
    Often it feels like reading a Twitter thread of ideas and hashtags, rather than watching a movie. Yet the final act, a “Purge”-like blood bath to the tune of vengeance, is aesthetically arresting.
  13. Love, Gilda
    Love, Gilda is a very affectionate reminder of her brief and brilliant career, a heartfelt love letter whose title might be more accurate without the comma.
  14. Fahrenheit 11/9
    Mr. Moore recognizes an affinity he shares with the president — also a showman. So he is in a nearly unique position to shame the viewer with a frank perspective on how Mr. Trump used his extrovert side to make citizens complacent about the less savory aspects of his character.
  15. Tea with the Dames
    I would not have minded a bit if the dames were given twice the amount of time this trim film allowed.
  16. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
    The movie has the pleasingly demented texture of early Tim Burton. It bears the logo of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin company and is seen from a Spielbergian child’s-eye view.
  17. The Song of Sway Lake
    The film seems unclear on how to unpack all its baggage, but the sense of detail and place carry the day.
  18. The Last Suit
    An unfortunately contrived Holocaust drama that labors under the delusion that the subject matter lends itself to uplift.
  19. Quincy
    The movie alternates between the present, with Mr. Jones on the go, and a retrospective of his life and career, narrated by the man himself. His hardscrabble early years on the South Side of Chicago are scary; his triumphs from the earliest points of his career onward are exhilarating; the racism he is obliged to endure throughout is infuriating.
  20. The Sisters Brothers
    Despite Mr. Audiard’s embrace of contemporary norms that would have been out of place in a Wayne western — the amusingly deployed coarse language, the shots to the head and sprays of blood — he isn’t attempting to rewrite genre in The Sisters Brothers, which is one of this movie’s virtues, along with its terrific actors and his sensitive direction of them.
  21. Life Itself
    Unreliability is a fascinating and tricky conceit for novelists and filmmakers. It should not be confused with bad writing. There is a lot of that here, and also, to confuse matters further, a lot of good acting.
  22. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
    Informative but not overwhelming, it blends biography and appreciative analysis in 90 brisk, packed minutes.
  23. Mandy
    The movie’s imagery is consistently unearthly; its pacing has a magisterial weight. Call it pulp Tarkovsky, maybe.
  24. Letter from Masanjia
    It’s an important story, made more intense by its tight focus.
  25. Museo
    In spite of a meandering story and some fuzzy passages, there is a touch of magic in Museo, a sense of wonder and curiosity that imparts palpable excitement.
  26. A Simple Favor
    Mr. Feig handily manages the mood and scene shifts, using regular laughs to brighten the deepening dark. By far his smartest move was to give Ms. Kendrick and Ms. Lively room to create a prickly intimacy for their characters, a bond that’s persuasive enough to push the story through its more forced moments.
  27. The Land of Steady Habits
    Even though Anders and the people around him can be sorted into recognizable types (a fault, mostly of Mr. Thompson’s book), they are also amusing and awful in ways that can feel disconcertingly real.
  28. Bel Canto
    A movie that, for all its operatic allusions and actorly expertise, feels dismayingly passionless.
  29. American Chaos
    It was a prescient plan. Mr. Stern, a longtime Democrat, vowed to listen closely, and he seems to have kept his word. Though he doesn’t mask his expressions — usually astounded, though never mocking — he’s a genial interviewer, empathic, he says, even if he can’t be sympathetic.
  30. Don't Leave Home
    Don’t Leave Home is a frustratingly befuddled movie that’s nevertheless fascinating.
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