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. River of Fundament
    River of Fundament is often a commanding, engaging and certainly challenging experience. Nevertheless, by the end of the piece I felt deliberately alienated, and to a nearly infuriating degree.
  2. The Messenger
    Overall, the arguments are persuasive, the message from the birds powerful, and the film a rich and satisfying call to action that is presented with some novel ideas for how to restore the ecological balance.
  3. A Royal Night Out
    What makes A Royal Night Out palatable are the lead performances.
  4. Bikes vs Cars
    Breezy, intelligent, diffuse but uncluttered, Fredrik Gertten’s documentary Bikes vs Cars could be called a tale of congestion-plagued cities.
  5. Dementia
    It’s an assured, deftly acted movie that builds its creepiness slowly and keeps its secrets well hidden till the end.
  6. Every Thing Will Be Fine
    Something is off with Every Thing Will Be Fine. Even for a movie about a writer detached from his emotions, it’s ponderous, like a lucid dream gone bad.
  7. My Friend Victoria
    As drifting and dreamy as its searching heroine, My Friend Victoria takes a graceful but unsatisfying stroll through the life and longings of a young black woman in contemporary Paris.
  8. Orion: The Man Who Would Be King
    It’s a curious, bittersweet story, flecked with dashes of bombast and overstatement that Presley himself would have admired.
  9. dream/killer
    Though the timeline and a few details could use further clarification, dream/killer remains fast-paced and frightening.
  10. The Lady in the Van
    In Ms. Smith’s tough, levelheaded performance, Mary is an irascible termagant full of batty notions clutching on to life as best she can. She is hard to like, and that’s good.
  11. Macbeth
    Mr. Fassbender gives you a reason to see this Macbeth, although the writing isn’t bad, either.
  12. Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
    There is a fine line between delving into the mysteries of life and engaging in mystification, and Mr. Gomes lands on the wrong side of it. There is something disingenuous in the way this movie disowns its own ambitions and scorns the possibility of clarity or coherence. Maybe its opacity is a matter of principle. Or maybe it’s just an excuse.
  13. Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
    Mr. Gomes has a tendency to revel in his own cleverness and to indulge in self-conscious cinematic jokes. He also has a penchant for obscurantism, a habit of confusing ambiguity with depth.
  14. Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
    It is worth sticking with it until the end, since the third part is the most powerful.
  15. Youth
    The problem with Youth is not that it’s empty — the accusation Kael and others lodged against Mr. Sorrentino’s precursors — but that it’s small. Its imagination feels shrunken and secondhand, in spite of the gorgeous vistas and beautiful naked women. Or actually, because of them.
  16. Krampus
    Occasionally funny, intermittently scary, but mostly hectic and sloppy, Krampus tries very hard to be a different kind of Christmas movie.
  17. The World of Kanako
    Mr. Nakashima, it must be said, does have a knack for composition. But the torrential, if glossy, violence — he adores juxtaposing innocuous pop ditties with gruesome set pieces — grows tiresome.
  18. Life
    Mr. Corbijn picturesquely frames the back story to the shoot, but his muffled retelling drifts with Dane DeHaan’s murmurous impersonation of Dean and Robert Pattinson’s almost perversely listless turn as Stock.
  19. The Letters
    Though speechifying and mawkishness are thankfully scarce, the bland script gives her few chances to go beyond the expected formula.
  20. The Wannabe
    Mr. Piazza offers a persuasive portrait of decline, but it is the crumbling beauty and flailing hopes of Rose that resonate. Ms. Arquette comprehends the character inside and out, and her aim is true.
  21. Chi-Raq
    The laughs in Spike Lee’s corrosive Chi-Raq burn like acid. Urgent, surreal, furious, funny and wildly messy, the movie sounds like an invitation to defeat, but it’s an improbable triumph that finds Mr. Lee doing his best work in years.
  22. Christmas, Again
    This is a Christmas movie in which magic exists largely on the periphery, and that is just the right mix of chilly and sweet.
  23. Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story
    It’s a fond and forgiving tribute to the man, filled with music that moves beyond happy and sad, and toward something like brilliance.
  24. Hitchcock/Truffaut
    Curating a selection of the original interview recordings (whose sound quality is damn near pristine), Mr. Jones fashions an unfaltering encomium that’s entirely free of the highfalutin monologues that might deter noncinephiles.
  25. Karski & the Lords of Humanity
    Karski & the Lords of Humanity is fascinating, but Mr. Lanzmann’s efforts tower over it.
  26. Tamasha
    The biggest offender is the director, Imtiaz Ali, who, also again collaborating with Mr. Kapoor, actually celebrates two love affairs: Ved and Tara’s, and (given Ved’s universal adulation) Mr. Ali’s with his own self-aggrandizing vision of his calling.
  27. Killing Them Safely
    Mr. Berardini’s packed documentary makes its case early and often, perhaps too often, but it’s more chilling than your average issue film.
  28. Stink!
    Sensible and unnerving, Stink! is likely to incite, at the least, a purging of Axe body spray from adolescent boys’ bedrooms.
  29. Iraqi Odyssey
    Watching it is like slowly leafing through a giant scrapbook whose contents include the individual stories of a large extended family.
  30. Submerged
    There’s claustrophobia to burn in Steven C. Miller’s Submerged, a modest thriller offering glints of talent amid predictable plot threads.
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