The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,269 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 20269
  2. Mixed: 8,428 out of 20269
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20269
20269 movie reviews
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  1. The Fencer
    The director, Klaus Haro, films the proceedings involvingly enough.... But the movie is almost relentlessly predictable and formulaic — a story of one man’s refusal to conform that dutifully hits all its marks.
  2. Amnesia
    Amnesia, Mr. Schroeder has said, is a story partly based on his mother, who refused to speak German, so perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s strongest when it focuses on Martha, a character Ms. Keller inhabits gracefully.
  3. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
    To say that “Valerian” is a science-fiction epic doesn’t quite do it justice. Imagine crushing a DVD of “The Phantom Menace” into a fine powder, tossing in some Adderall and Ecstasy and a pinch of cayenne pepper and snorting the resulting mixture while wearing a virtual reality helmet in a Las Vegas karaoke bar. Actually, that sounds like too much fun, but you get the idea.
  4. First Kill
    The movie, directed by Steven C. Miller, doesn’t hold a lot of surprises, but there is worse terror-in-the-woods fare out there — rather a lot of it, in fact.
  5. The Black Prince
    A dramatic life does not necessarily a dramatic film make.
  6. Becoming Bond
    On the whole, Becoming Bond is sufficiently winning that you might even forgive its chapter titles, each one a worse-than-the-previous play on a James Bond-associated phrase
  7. Midnight Return: The Story of Billy Hayes and Turkey
    The movie is at its most entertaining when detailing the making of “Midnight Express” and the contentious personalities involved.
  8. Dunkirk
    Dunkirk is a tour de force of cinematic craft and technique, but one that is unambiguously in the service of a sober, sincere, profoundly moral story that closes the distance between yesterday’s fights and today’s.
  9. Girls Trip
    Girls Trip adds complexity to the picture by bringing in class, even as it dispatches with whiteness, showing it the door so that these women can find themselves while rediscovering the power and pleasures of sisterhood.
  10. Santoalla
    Santoalla ends with the mystery solved. The threads that remain hanging imbue this peculiar story of paradise lost with a tragic resonance.
  11. Our Beloved Month of August
    The whole turns out to be less than the sum of its elegantly constructed and cleverly uncategorizable parts.
  12. The Wrong Light
    In the end, The Wrong Light is an engrossing cautionary tale teaching one of philanthropy’s oldest lessons: Caveat emptor.
  13. Birthright: A War Story
    Birthright: A War Story packs a powerful message: that reproduction has become perilous for women in America.
  14. Almost Sunrise
    We’re left once again feeling we’ve had only a glimmer of illumination on a vexingly complex problem.
  15. Lady Macbeth
    Mr. Oldroyd boxes Katherine in his attractive visuals, imprisoning her as her male relatives do. Yet his intellectual distance also turns her into a specimen, a pinned butterfly turned taxidermy beast.
  16. False Confessions
    There is little to recommend here, even for Huppert completists who follow her anywhere.
  17. Footnotes
    The songs are unmemorable and the choreography less than twinkle-toed, but the lyrics are a delight.
  18. Blind
    The film, directed by Michael Mailer, wanted to be a steamy romance, but it ended up leaden and occasionally laughable.
  19. Wish Upon
    The splatter is deployed cautiously and sometimes wittily, the story moving briskly from wishes granted to costs exacted with the help of familiar faces (including a warm Sherilyn Fenn as Clare’s surrogate mother) and a sympathetic lead.
  20. Chasing Coral
    It’s an environmental tragedy of our own making, the film heartbreakingly argues, that has little hope of being reversed without immediate human intervention.
  21. Endless Poetry
    The images in Endless Poetry are arresting and sometimes disturbing, but there is an earnest commitment to ecstasy and authenticity that renders moot any question of offensiveness or exploitation.
  22. I Am the Blues
    Less of a solemn pilgrimage than a folksy visit, this film is a chance to set a spell, watch longtime musicians play and boast and reflect about their lives on and off the road.
  23. 500 Years
    Heavy with emotion yet light on information, 500 Years has the curious effect of being both passionate and pale. You may find yourself championing its subjects even while feeling confounded by the omission of details by its filmmaker.
  24. Bronx Gothic
    Given the aesthetically confrontational nature of the piece, one can understand why Mr. Rossi did not attempt an undiluted cinematic translation of the complete Bronx Gothic. But something about his approach (which I assume was approved by Ms. Okpokwasili, as she is one of the movie’s executive producers) feels, finally, like an evasion.
  25. War for the Planet of the Apes
    There is a scene toward the end of War for the Planet of the Apes that is as vivid and haunting as anything I’ve seen in a Hollywood blockbuster in ages, a moment of rousing and dreadful cinematic clarity that I don’t expect to shake off any time soon.
  26. Swim Team
    Swim Team mostly aims to educate and inspire; on those counts, it succeeds.
  27. The Rehearsal
    At the end Ms. Maclean forsakes all the unsettling subtlety and nuance she has had so clearly in her command to serve up a finale that I found frankly confounding, despite its having been foreshadowed.
  28. The Confessions
    An investigation among the attendees grants Mr. Andò the opportunity to pursue pithy, discursive exchanges about power, austerity and capitalism amid high-end accommodations and a tasteful classical soundtrack.
  29. City of Ghosts
    More information and in-depth analysis, as well as greater restraint in the use of atrocity images, might have deepened a movie that leans on shortcuts and visual shocks.
  30. Darkness Rising
    There are almost too many references to other movies for this one to become its own monster.
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