The New York Times' Scores

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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
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  1. Unfriended
    It reminds you that today’s horror movies still owe a great debt to Val Lewton, the producer of cheapie classics like “Cat People” (1942) and a virtuoso of shadows who realized that audiences could be entertained if the characters they watched looked like them. “Unfriended” doesn’t have Lewton’s poetry. Yet the filmmakers understand that one way into an audience’s head and nervous system is to fill the screen with the kind of “insipidly normal characters” (as the critic Manny Farber described Lewton’s) you’re happy to see shiver and scream.
  2. Reset
    The fragmented and existential atmosphere, reminiscent of a Paul Auster novel, is an interesting reward for sticking with the tale.
  3. The Sisterhood of Night
    Even with sections recalling both “The Crucible” and an “Afterschool Special,” it still fashions a story that’s fairly fresh and often absorbing.
  4. Song from the Forest
    This nonjudgmental documentary moves between New York City and the rain forests of the Central African Republic, where Mr. Sarno primarily lives. Both places are tugs of war between abundance and lack.
  5. Clouds of Sils Maria
    The three women in Clouds of Sils Maria love, talk and move, move, move, sharing lives, trading roles and performing parts. The lives they lead are messy and indeterminate, but each woman’s life belongs to her.
  6. Kill Me Three Times
    It’s of course unfair to blame Quentin Tarantino for all the terrible movies he has inspired, but enough already!
  7. In the Courtyard
    Falling back repeatedly on in-your-face symbolism — especially with regard to the specter of decline — Mr. Salvadori seems content to idle in neutral.
  8. Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!
    The twisty story has a kink or two too many, a problem of whodunit plotting rather than of Bollywood excess. And the war comes across here as a kind of heightened backdrop rather than real crisis. But these aren’t fatal deficiencies in a film more attuned to movie-made ideas of history and style than to history itself.
  9. The Living
    The emotional dynamics in domestic violence, for the abuser and the abused, are often too disturbing and complex to be treated as superficially as The Living does.
  10. Desert Dancer
    Desert Dancer explores fascinating aspects of present-day Iran but suffers mightily from simplistic and sentimental tendencies.
  11. The Harvest
    There may be little to give you the collywobbles, but there’s quite a lot to enjoy, with Ms. Morton heading the list. Swaddled in thick cardis and shapeless scrubs, she makes Katherine a well of overanxious care and castrating comments.
  12. In Country
    Are these re-enactors really as clueless as they seem, or is the portrait just incomplete? It’s impossible to tell from this too-sparse film.
  13. Broken Horses
    A deeply silly drama of corrupted innocence.
  14. Black Souls
    Black Souls is an ominous, well-acted portrait of an ingrown feudal society of violence, retaliation and deadly machismo.
  15. Lost River
    Lost River ponders people and places left behind in the name of progress. Slyly political, it observes the mortgage crisis through a warped looking glass. The cinematographer, Benoît Debie, finds a perverse beauty in the decline.
  16. Ex Machina
    [Mr. Garland] plays with visual contrasts — Mr. Isaac’s compact, muscled body and Mr. Gleeson’s long, drooping one, picture windows that look out onto an expansively lush landscape and windowless rooms that register as upmarket prison cells — that dovetail with the narrative’s multiple, amusingly deployed dualities: confinement and liberation, agency and submission, mind and body.
  17. Rebels of the Neon God
    Mr. Tsai typically uses narrative as a tool for exploring the moods and meanings that link his characters with one another and with the city that awakens, contains and frustrates their desires. They seem very much stuck in their world, but because that world is the creation of a wildly original artist coming into his own, it also feels alive with possibility.
  18. Dior and I
    There are some amusing moments, to be sure, and some touching ones as well, but the film is less interested in ideas or emotions than in illusions. It produces an aura of suspense without a sense of real risk, and offers devotees of fashion an appealing, shallow fantasy of inside knowledge.
  19. The Longest Ride
    Someone put together a listicle! That’s the kind of criticism this brand was made for.
  20. About Elly (2009)
    About Elly is gorgeous to look at. The ever-changing sky and sea lend it a moodiness so palpable that the climate itself seems a major character dictating the course of events; the weather rules.
  21. The Forecaster
    The Forecaster has the distinct hermetic feel of a documentary that employs an echo chamber of people too close to the material.
  22. That Guy Dick Miller
    The survey, pockmarked with sometimes dopey animations and music, feels scattered and less than the sum of Mr. Miller’s many parts. But it has its heart in the right movie-mad place.
  23. The Hand That Feeds
    The Hand That Feeds is an effective portrayal of the intricacies of activism — and of a situation in which victories seem all too brief.
  24. 5 to 7
    The city doesn’t need to be real in a romantic movie, but the feelings must be. Although Mr. Levin tends to embrace clichés and overstatement (Brian’s parents, Arlene and Sam, played by Glenn Close and Frank Langella, are straight out of Yiddish vaudeville), he can also surprise you with delicate touches, a pained look, a wince of recognition.
  25. Boychoir
    There’s nothing wrong with being uplifting, but something less predictable would have been refreshing.
  26. Manos Sucias
    The light is menacing, the mood watchful and the action scenes have a crude, desperate energy that gets the job done. Here, violence is neither weightless nor glorified, but just another obstacle on the way to a better future.
  27. The Girl Is in Trouble
    A modern-day noir weighed down by redundant narration and a forced plot, The Girl Is in Trouble feels like a tug of war between the actors, who understand the need for lightness, and dialogue that emerges in expository clots.
  28. Last Knights
    Its cast aside, Last Knights proves as square and blandly manly as an old “Prince Valiant” comic strip. Mr. Owen’s hairdo and the faint smile edging his lips are more fetching than anything about Val, and the movie’s violence is more explicit than in most vintage comics, but “Knights” also works by combining narrative simplicity with moral certitude and appealing graphics.
  29. Lambert & Stamp
    A loving, freewheeling new documentary by James D. Cooper, tells this origin story with panache and nostalgia.
  30. Cut Bank
    It is up to its fine cast to build what little sense of mystery is conjured and to bring a sense of coherence to a narrative mishmash that is all smirking attitude with no subtext. Think of it as a goof.
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