The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,268 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 4.3 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: 9,377 out of 20268
  2. Mixed: 8,427 out of 20268
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20268
20268 movie reviews
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  1. Elevation
    Directed by George Nolfi (“The Adjustment Bureau”), Elevation is distinctive not for its innovations in form or narrative — it’s got nothing new to offer — but for the anxieties and attitudes it telegraphs.
  2. Pedro Páramo
    Where this rich, metaphysical text might have come alive in dreamlike abstraction, Prieto and his screenwriter, Mateo Gil, instead content themselves with a prestige Western on terra firma — grave, good-looking and uninspiring.
  3. Meet Me Next Christmas
    In recent years Netflix has become a factory for B-rate Christmas movies, with the occasional cheap comfort to be found in its manufactured holiday romances. This bizarre concoction, not so much.
  4. The Graduates
    Peterson’s script is frustratingly single-note and occasionally bends toward unearned sentimentality. Still, The Graduates feels true to its milieu; its emotional clarity impressive given the loaded subject matter and the film’s subdued style.
  5. After: Poetry Destroys Silence
    The director hasn’t found a rhythm or pace to lend momentum to this exploration of disparate material.
  6. Here
    Don’t force a plot to emerge. Better to experience “Here” like open-eyed meditation, nodding at connections and ideas so fragile they’d disintegrate if said aloud.
  7. Youth (Hard Times)
    Shot in a present-tense vérité style, it stitches together micro-stories into a larger narrative in which negotiation can’t undo exploitation.
  8. Lost on a Mountain in Maine
    “Lost on a Mountain” never fully achieves its complicated halcyon aims.
  9. A Real Pain
    A Real Pain is a fluidly blended amalgam of pleasing, approachable subgenres, including an odd-couple buddy flick, a consciousness-raising road movie and a charged family melodrama.
  10. Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat
    In making Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, the director Johan Grimonprez used every instrument cinema affords. His documentary is rhythmic and propulsive, with reverberating sound and images juxtaposed against one another to lend more meaning. The result, in a word, is marvelous.
  11. Chasing Chasing Amy
    Rodgers, a sheepish and at times bewildered guide, seems ill-equipped to reconcile Adams’s reflections with his admiration for Smith and “Chasing Amy,” and instead pivots the story to focus on his own personal and professional evolution.
  12. The Gutter
    In addition to ridiculous — think the Wayans brothers’ parody pictures, or “Napoleon Dynamite” (that movie’s director, Jared Hess, is an executive producer here) — the humor is almost uniformly broad.
  13. Absolution
    Wrapped in drab visuals and a doomy atmosphere, Absolution paints a world where lowlifes rule and neither doctors nor priests can be trusted. Yet there are moments when the beatdowns pause and a misty melancholy shines through.
  14. Blitz
    The movie bears comparisons to Dickens, both for George’s plight and for the depiction of class divides across a war-torn London. But there is something else going on narratively here. For one, McQueen makes a point of integrating into the film what is rarely seen in movies of this sort: a sharp depiction of racism among Londoners, the enraging sort that has so calcified it still surfaces when people are just trying to survive.
  15. Dahomey
    Most interestingly, we listen in on young Beninese as they discuss the wider repercussions in an open forum. . . It’s a rich conversation that rapidly lays out the controversies and bigger issues at stake.
  16. Conclave
    With pomp and circumstance, miles of scarlet cloth and first-rate scene-stealers, the movie snakes through the marbled corridors of Vatican City, pauses in bedchambers as cold as mausoleums and tunnels into the deepest secrets of the human heart. It’s quite the journey, and as unpersuasive as it is entertaining.
  17. Your Monster
    Your Monster, while falling short of the Critic’s Pick status that Jacob vociferously covets for his show, has its charms, namely the backstage intrigue, onstage songs by the Lazours (of the current Off Broadway musical “We Live in Cairo”), and a disarming lead in Barrera.
  18. La Cocina
    The film’s epic finale feels stagy — while these real-life frustrations are anything but.
  19. Magpie
    A lean, mean revenge thriller that knows exactly what it’s about, Magpie has little originality but an invigorating clarity of purpose.
  20. My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock
    Cousins’s attuned eye and ear keep us interested afresh in the Hitchcock magic.
  21. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
    A rare and beautiful thing: a moving documentary that excavates the question of the “real” in a profoundly humanistic and unconventional way.
  22. Memoir of a Snail
    The world that Elliot creates is so strangely beautiful that it’s fun to look at. Plus, the end of “Memoir of a Snail” redeems its flights into tedium by giving us a reason to have watched them.
  23. Black Box Diaries
    The movie’s intimacy is appealing; on occasion, it can be claustrophobic. Black Box Diaries is, at heart, a first-person account, and while it’s successful on those terms, it’s finally more emotionally engaging than intellectually satisfying.
  24. Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
    At this point in time, Springsteen is the world’s greatest living entertainer, full stop. “Road Diary,” a new documentary directed by Thom Zimny, offers dynamic proof for this argument.
  25. Venom: The Last Dance
    Hardy voices both reedy Eddie and gravelly Venom and his roiling one-man-band of a performance continues to be the only reason to keep up with the films.
  26. Family Pack
    The game itself is so good. I’m not sure the movie understands why.
  27. Allswell in New York
    If few of the melodramatic plot lines wrap up by the end, at least the members of the ensemble cast commit to their roles with naturalistic gusto.
  28. Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara
    “Fanatical” is both a truly appalling story and a peek into something darker and more sinister about the way social groups form and evolve — and devolve, too — when the internet mediates it all.
  29. Union
    Union is as interested in intra-union disputes as it is in the fight writ large. But the external obstacles are clear as well.
  30. Exhibiting Forgiveness
    Forgiveness may not be about making nice. Filling in a painful gap may not lead to tidy reconciliation. Still, something true will appear. Kaphar may be new to feature filmmaking, but that’s some grown wisdom.
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