The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Listen to Me Marlon
    While its subject means that "Listen to Me” is easy to like, Mr. Riley’s shaping of Brando’s words can make the movie, every so often, difficult to fully embrace.
  2. Vacation
    Strengthening of brotherly and marital bonds is the real agenda, of course, but happily the movie never stays on these laugh-killing themes long.
  3. A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile
    Even knowing the secret of A Gay Girl in Damascus doesn’t make this documentary any less tense. That’s a testament to Sophie Deraspe, a director who understands how to let a plot unfold.
  4. Dark Was the Night
    The trouble lies in Tyler Hisel’s script, which teems with wheezy conventions.
  5. Big Significant Things
    Big Significant Things is a cute idea in search of substance.
  6. The Vatican Tapes
    The director Mark Neveldine deploys queasy lighting and a trembling score, but his best choice is to let Ms. Dudley stare at us. She conveys unnerving shifts in self-awareness and sinister intent with her eyes.
  7. Unexpected
    The nuanced performances of Ms. Smulders and Ms. Bean are flawless. Yet the movie’s calm levelheadedness is a subtle detriment. Everything is a little too easy.
  8. Horse Money
    The puzzle-box narrative only grows more hypnotic with repeat viewings. The movie insists on having the audience, like Ventura, pass through madness to reach catharsis.
  9. The Young Kieslowski
    This small, observant movie, directed and written by Kerem Sanga, is the better for not going in predictable directions. A story that you half-expect to turn into a melodrama stays true to the sensibilities of its immature, painfully sincere characters, who are faced with life-changing decisions.
  10. Frank the Bastard
    The indecipherable motivations and half-baked subtexts present formidable challenges to the cast and the audience.
  11. Lucky Stiff
    With songs about shoes and dogs, Lucky Stiff couldn’t be sillier, but Mr. Marsh and especially Ms. James make it an enjoyable curiosity for fans of musical theater.
  12. The Outrageous Sophie Tucker
    The movie isn’t especially well made, yet because Tucker is such a gloriously rich figure — immigrant turned runaway mother turned vaudevillian turned superstar — she renders its formal and aesthetic shortcomings (mostly) irrelevant.
  13. Phoenix
    Never less than intriguing, coolly intelligent and flawlessly paced, Phoenix often feels trapped in the logic of its conceit.
  14. Only You
    Only You is served very well by Ms. Tang (a star of Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution”). Whether playing elated, sorrowful, coy or petulant, she consistently provides the spark the movie could use more of.
  15. Paper Towns
    In the end, what makes Q such a deceptively tricky literary creation — his averageness — is the very thing the filmmakers struggle with, partly because movies of this commercial scale and bottom-line ambition rarely know what to do with ordinary life.
  16. Samba
    Mr. Toledano and Mr. Nakache, who wrote the scattered screenplay, have a well-honed touch for comic beats and a feel for workaday details. That comes in handy when their points about French identity miss the mark, or when the main characters share special moments without really acquiring depth.
  17. Five Star
    Slow and steady, and with remarkable assuredness, Keith Miller’s Five Star plays mean-streets drama in the lowest of keys.
  18. Pixels
    it’s not as original as it wants to be, despite having the able Chris Columbus in the director’s chair.
  19. Southpaw
    The plotting is somehow both flat-footed and operatic in its absurdity. Character arcs are tangled, flattened and foreshortened. Common sense is knocked silly. But Mr. Fuqua has never been a director to let ridiculousness get in the way of visceral action.
  20. Twinsters
    The film has too many fits of uncontrolled laughter and other awkwardness that suggest an unedited home movie, but, in general, Twinsters makes for a heartfelt alternative to a traditional documentary approach.
  21. Famous Nathan
    The movie is choppy and rushed — a bumper-car ride that somehow fits the rough-and-tumble era it recalls.
  22. Lila & Eve
    The main, and perhaps the only, reason to see the revenge thriller Lila and Eve, a shallow, cut-rate “Thelma and Louise,” is for the thunderous lead performance of Viola Davis.
  23. Northern Limit Line
    Striving to dramatize a real-life battle that occurred in 2002 near Yeonpyeong Island in the Yellow Sea, the writer and director, Kim Hak-soon, stirs corn and cliché into a paean to patriotism.
  24. Alléluia
    Alleluia is a fever dream of sex, jealousy and murder whose intensity leaves you spellbound.
  25. Steak (R)evolution
    This informative foodie film is more than just footage of assorted chefs cooking delicious-looking cuts of meat. The tour encompasses breeders, butchers, grazing practices and genetics.
  26. Ardor
    This slow-paced, cut-to-the-bone drama ought to be gripping, especially as the jungle and its beasts make their presence felt. But curiously, Ardor lacks tension, maybe because the actors are playing archetypes: Little is said, and there are few surprises.
  27. A Hard Day
    A kinetically visceral, enjoyable nasty joy ride, “A Hard Day” is pretty much as advertised.
  28. Mr. Holmes
    The film’s plots are soft and flimsy, and they don’t mesh as gracefully as they might, but they do serve as an adequate trellis for Mr. McKellen’s performance, which is gratifyingly but unsurprisingly wonderful.
  29. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    The experiment’s methodologies and meanings have been analyzed endlessly over the years, and the film doesn’t delve deeply into these interpretations and critiques. It doesn’t need to; this stark and riveting version of events speaks for itself.
  30. The Look of Silence
    A painful, profoundly empathetic work of moral reckoning.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »