The New York Times' Scores

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:
20269 movie reviews
  1. Part of the draw of these movies is that they don’t create beauty, but instead borrow the emotions of the beauty they depict. (This, more or less, is one definition of kitsch, courtesy of the philosopher Tomas Kulka.) That makes the movies easy to watch and easy to forget.
  2. The vision of nature being lovingly tended in Rosie Stapel’s documentary, Portrait of a Garden, is remarkably evocative.
  3. It may surprise people who’ve experienced the Gallaghers only in tabloid-fodder mode that “Supersonic” teems with stirring and even moving moments.
  4. The whole thing eventually devolves into the maelstrom of reactionary moralizing that is Mr. Perry’s specialty, not that any informed viewer would have reason to expect otherwise
  5. Fire at Sea occupies your consciousness like a nightmare, and yet somehow you don’t want it to end.
  6. To say it feels reasonably authentic doesn’t mean it’s very good. Mr. Kelly, who directed the well-received “I Am Michael,” starring Mr. Franco as a Christian pastor with a gay past, clearly knows the territory, but he barely skims the surface.
  7. The substantial pleasures of the movie are supplemented by the gratification of seeing an emerging talent with concerns far outside the conventional indie realm asserting himself with such authority.
  8. Most extraordinary are interviews with the women who came forward to provide evidence in court. Their integrity and tenacity, and their loyalty to one another, is enough to bring you to tears.
  9. Cristin Milioti (“How I Met Your Mother”) is so quirkily endearing in the lead role that she makes it easy to just go with the airy tale.
  10. The Whole Truth plays like an especially claustrophobic courtroom procedural, drably photographed and generically framed.
  11. The film wants to spur individual changes in behavior, but there’s a fair amount in it that might discourage you from even trying.
  12. Mr. West retains his signature restraint and slow-burn approach to brutality. Missing, however, is his typically skillful manipulation of tension, partly because his tone veers so often from jokey to reverential, from winking at the western to making a sacrament of it.
  13. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is the second movie that Tom Cruise has starred in as this title character. Let’s hope it’s the last.
  14. American Pastoral leaves a residue of dread and despair that is oddly in keeping with today’s moment of uncertainty amid an ugly presidential campaign.
  15. Creepy certainly works — looks and feels — like a horror movie, but it also has the conundrums of a detective story, the emotional currents of a domestic drama and the quickening pulse of a psychological thriller, a combination that creates a kind of destabilization.
  16. A rebus, a romance, a gothic thriller and a woozy comedy, The Handmaiden is finally and most significantly a liberation story.
  17. 31
    Awash in blood and revoltingly misogynistic dialogue, this latest redneck ruckus (his seventh feature) is a grindhouse slog of unrelenting bad taste.
  18. The director, Mike Flanagan, who with Jeff Howard also wrote the script, demonstrates rare patience for horror fare as he builds toward the macabre.
  19. The absence of laughs can’t be blamed on a lack of talent.
  20. Moonlight is both a disarmingly, at times almost unbearably personal film and an urgent social document, a hard look at American reality and a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces.
  21. Mr. Moore has basically made an earnest but not very entertaining pro-Clinton campaign film, occasionally funny, momentarily heartfelt when he takes up the subject of universal health care and the lives lost for lack of it. Against the rest of his work (“Bowling for Columbine,” “Roger & Me”) it’s fairly tepid stuff.
  22. Without the benefit of theatrical devices that might clarify the order of events, its time warps undermine the plot.
  23. Narrated, rather annoyingly, by the Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds, Huntwatch feels dismayingly one-sided. Yet as we hear of animals being skinned alive and see a bludgeoned pup linger in agony, any pro-hunt argument seems emphatically beside the point.
  24. The script, by Mr. Dekker, spirals into a muddle of ambiguity, leaving only the imagery and the performances to save the movie. And try as they might, they cannot.
  25. A strange, spiky movie that refuses to beg for our affection, Little Sister, the fifth feature from Zach Clark, molds the classic homecoming drama into a quirky reconciliation between faith and family.
  26. As Salinger, the formidable Chris Cooper has a brief but masterly turn, sympathetically rendering the writer as a curmudgeon defending his literary offspring.
  27. As the suspense slackens and blood starts spilling nearly to the point of self-parody, it almost seems designed as a test of mettle — for both the filmmakers and the audience.
  28. The movie isn’t interested in fully developed characters, just carnage.
  29. Even as Ms. Hall’s performance makes you believe that something profound is at stake, the movie noncommittally nibbles at the edge of larger meaning, nodding at current events.
  30. The subtlety of the film is both an accomplishment and a limitation. It’s hard not to want more for these women, and to wish you could see more of them.

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