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. The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest
    The indomitable personality and talents of the serial prison escapee Mark DeFriest outshine the weaknesses of this documentary that bears his name.
  2. An Honest Liar
    Directors Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom have produced a jaunty, jovial portrait with a surprising sting in its tail.
  3. Two Men in Town
    The desert landscapes are gorgeously shot by Yves Cape, but Two Men in Town never seems to fully inhabit its setting. Nor does the schematic, occasionally clumsy story do justice to the skills of the cast.
  4. Unfinished Business
    A “EuroTrip” with balance sheets, the slick, innocuous comedy Unfinished Business fails to seal the deal.
  5. October Gale
    Ms. Clarkson and Mr. Speedman do what they can with their underwritten and overly contrived roles... Late in the game, Tim Roth boats in as Tom, a local with a grudge, and shocks the movie to life by throwing some lightning bolts of his own.
  6. Kidnapping Mr. Heineken
    Mr. Hopkins doesn’t have much to do, but it can be amusing to see him upstage everyone else with sonorous murmurings and imperious demands for a robe and Chinese takeout.
  7. Faults
    While Faults glances at the narcissism of cult leaders, its most penetrating investigation is into the root emptiness within disciples, the desperate hunger to relinquish personal initiative.
  8. Buzzard
    With its casual deadpan attitude, Buzzard offers a nightmare portrait of arrested development and anomie for the age of inequality.
  9. Chappie
    Even at his shakiest, Mr. Blomkamp holds your attention with stories about characters banding together to emerge from a hell not of their own making, a liberation journey that just isn’t the same old, same old when a director was born in South Africa.
  10. Merchants of Doubt
    Merchants of Doubt, Robert Kenner’s informative and infuriating new documentary, ought to remind us that the denial of climate change is hardly a joke.
  11. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    In aggressively sunny picker-uppers like the Marigold movies, there is a thin line between adorable and insufferable. And in the second “Marigold,” Mr. Patel has succumbed to his tendency toward cuteness.
  12. The Lesson
    The plot undermines the film’s power. At the end you may be impressed at the skill on display, but you may also wish that you were more fully moved by the spectacle of a soul laid bare and transformed.
  13. Around The World In 50 Concerts
    If the movie gets a bit gooey at times that’s probably an occupational hazard when considering the sublime. And Ms. Honigmann’s restraint — there’s something classical in her style, too — keeps the film from floating away. When it threatens to, something piercing or traumatic brings it back to earth, where any account of art belongs.
  14. Focus
    The preposterousness of the story doesn’t seem like a rip-off, since the twists in the plot, for the most part, pay off nicely.
  15. Eastern Boys
    Explores interlocking themes of sexuality, immigration and power dynamics with a cleareyed sensitivity and refuses to demonize even its shadiest characters.
  16. Young Bodies Heal Quickly
    Some of the deadpan moments and more fraught exchanges don’t really come off. But all in all, it’s one curious, and furious, escapade.
  17. Futuro Beach
    Balancing its abstract storytelling with commanding visuals (by the gifted cinematographer Ali Olcay Gözkaya), Futuro Beach explores liberation and reinvention, the tug of familiarity versus the allure of the foreign.
  18. Out of the Dark
    Ornamenting its flimsy back story with assaultive sound effects and asinine behavior, Out of the Dark strains to shock.
  19. Bluebird
    On one level, Bluebird is a bitter slice of life about hardy, stoic New Englanders battling the elements and a crumbling regional economy. On another, it’s a poetic meditation on the human struggle to make sense of a cruel and indifferent universe.
  20. The Widowmaker
    The Widowmaker is commendable in that although it is a work of advocacy, it gives an array of opinions.
  21. The Salvation
    This is, it’s worth remembering, a movie set in the American West that was shot in South Africa by a Danish director with a Danish star. In other words it’s another dream of America, feverish, lovely and absurd.
  22. '71
    Mr. Demange makes his feature directing debut with ’71, but he already knows how to move bodies through space and the complex choreography that he’s worked out in this movie is a thing of joy.
  23. Maps to the Stars
    It takes a perverse effort of will to love “Maps to the Stars.” It’s a little too chilly, and in some places too easy. But you may find yourself drawn back to it, and retracing its route from the familiar to the uncanny, from entertainment to revulsion, from dream to nightmare.
  24. The Lazarus Effect
    Despite eclectic casting and occasional experiments with objective camera, the director, David Gelb (“Jiro Dreams of Sushi”), can’t breathe similar life into this risible mix of pseudoscientific hokum and supernatural freakouts.
  25. The Hunting Ground
    What cuts through the filmmaking clutter are the young women and men who share their accounts of abuse by both their attackers and their schools.
  26. Farewell to Hollywood
    Farewell to Hollywood is moving yet queasily unsettling, even if Ms. Nicholson’s enthusiasm mitigates the veneer of exploitation. Watching it feels like judging a last will and testament. The movie is an intimate dialogue from which viewers may prefer to recuse themselves.
  27. Wild Canaries
    Mr. Levine spins a caper that wins you over more through tenacity than through originality.
  28. Kung Fu Elliot
    Watching Elliot and his fellows stumble determinedly through shoots, pleasantly delusional about the movie’s prospects, is mildly amusing, a testament to indie film’s appeal for a certain hardy strain of dreamer. But the joke sours, and the documentary, filmed over two years, turns darker.
  29. The DUFF
    Even in this would-be subversive comedy. Success means getting the guy. Getting good grades (as Bianca does) is not enough, nor is writing the front-page article in the school paper.
  30. Wild Tales
    Mr. Szifron creates inhabited worlds with comic timing and visual flair, but you can hear him chortling as he shovels his people into the grinder.
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