The New York Times' Scores

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:
20278 movie reviews
  1. There’s something woebegone about the film itself as it staggers along, ever in danger of tipping into the abyss inhabited by one of its subjects.
  2. While the scenes shown from “Bulletproof,” the western they complete, are haphazard, that’s of little concern. If you want to see real courage, it’s not in that movie anyway. It’s in this documentary.
  3. With its evocative landscapes and its non-narrative, cinéma vérité style, Western is a layered, atmospheric chronicle of living traditions like bullfights and rodeos, mariachi bands and Texas two-steps. Yet the film also records the tremors of change.
  4. The Wildlike landscapes are exhilarating, but when the film works, it’s because of the interiors.
  5. Perhaps because it tries too hard to be too many things, the movie loses its punch.
  6. A buoyantly funny, sometimes desperately sad film.
  7. Mr. Barber can work up a fair sense of menace, but he seems to have directed most of the talented cast to speak their lines in a mannered fashion learned from other movies.
  8. Ashby is a movie divided against itself. It’s a comedy afraid of being too funny lest its macho sentimentality seem even more ridiculous than it is, and a drama afraid of appearing too serious lest you dismiss it as hogwash.
  9. Dan Kay’s filament-thin story, accessorized with flapping vultures and disturbing graffiti, relies entirely on Mr. Cage’s desperate-dad energy.
  10. The film reawakens long-repudiated notions of white supremacy and such, but Mr. Roth is surely not trying to peddle them. He’s merely seeing if he can replicate the formula of the subgenre. And he does, fairly slickly, in fact.
  11. Some jokes actually work (a GPS-voice gag induced unforced laughter), and the whole thing is amiable and colorful and surprisingly low on body-function gags. It may not kill you to take your kids.
  12. The makers of A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story leave a few too many questions unanswered, but their subject’s immense optimism steamrolls through the documentary’s shortcomings. Indeed, there seems to be little this woman can’t vanquish.
  13. Revealing its humanity slowly and a little tardily, Finders Keepers finally does justice to its dueling antiheroes.
  14. Documentaries about disabilities don’t come any smarter or more touching than Mission to Lars, a beautiful sibling road trip tale with a heavy-metal flourish.
  15. Focusing on the magazine and not its offshoots, the film is uproarious, not for what its many talking heads say but for its astonishing procession of brilliant, boundary-breaching illustrations and captions (augmented by some animation), many of which are as explosively funny today as they were when first published.
  16. Mississippi Grind itself may be a bit of a throwback to the lived-in, character-driven, landscape-besotted films of the 1970s, but it’s less a pastiche or a homage than the cinematic equivalent of a classic song, expertly covered.
  17. The feisty, lovelorn Ray is far and away the strongest, most complex character, and Mr. Beauchamp gives him his due, even though too many of his speeches sound like a mix of biographical filler and boilerplate sloganeering.
  18. If 99 Homes is a scolding look at a society gone astray, it is also a minor masterpiece of suspense, as tightly wound as “Sicario,” Denis Villeneuve’s white-knuckle drug-war thriller, and almost as brutal.
  19. Mr. De Niro owns the movie from the moment he opens his mouth, and is staring into the camera and right at you.
  20. The songs in Office aren’t especially memorable. But it’s hard to care too much when you have a director who knows how to create tension by moving the camera and characters even while he’s delivering a nimble political softshoe with filmmaking dazzle.
  21. Mr. Ryoo (“The Unjust,” “The City of Violence”) isn’t known for his sense of humor, but Veteran is amusing throughout, even if the funny scenes are more subdued or go on a beat or two longer than American viewers are used to.
  22. While it would be a tall order to fully elucidate this complicated history in two hours, Olvidados is hamstrung by Mr. Bolado’s lack of focused direction and a convoluted plot.
  23. With its light silent comedy, Mr. Wenders’s film presents movie history as a meeting of the inventive and the inevitable — a playful lark.
  24. It’s the film’s sounds that really wrench. If you’ve ever wondered what a breaking heart sounds like, it’s right here in the futile warble of the last male of a species of songbird, singing for a mate that will never come.
  25. Bonobos: Back to the Wild is an uncomfortable mix of fictionalized account and nature film, but you have to admire the work it documents.
  26. I was just at the right place at the right time,” Mr. Petrov says, a simple truth that becomes shocking when considering the alternative. For that alone, this account of a Cold War near miss deserves a wide audience.
  27. It’s tantalizing, sublimely creepy stuff that keeps you guessing even after the credits roll.
  28. Scattering history lessons and ambiguous imagery amid Ms. Yoo’s engagement with North Koreans, her film implicitly asks: What must they think of us?
  29. Ms. Berg has created an unnerving, sometimes infuriating documentary. She makes smart choices throughout as she weaves together this chronicle of faith and abuse.
  30. The New Girlfriend never pretends to be more than what it is, a delicious and frothy fantasia with a teasing erotic frisson.

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