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. It's All So Quiet
    Ms. Leopold’s previous film, “Brownian Movement,” was a stringent, even off-putting study of a delicate-looking doctor who has secret trysts with various men, and her latest feature feels gentler, shot digitally and suffused with the gray shadows of old houses and dim twilights. But it’s just as concerned with the immediacy of desire.
  2. Ode to My Father
    Little more than an archipelago of historical set pieces linked by a syrupy causeway of sentiment, JK Youn’s Ode to My Father may have slain them in South Korea, but its packaged pain and bullet-point structure are likely to leave Western audiences cold.
  3. La Última Película
    The movie revels in multiple film stocks (with hairs or threads often on the camera lens) and self-conscious “Last Movie” flourishes (long intervals between credits, “scene missing” title cards, a version of “Me and Bobby McGee”) while maintaining its blithe humor.
  4. Valley of Saints
    Valley of Saints finds a poignant humanity in this chaste romance, which awakens in Gulzar a wondrous sense of possibility, along with a new awareness of the world’s complexity.
  5. Something, Anything
    Examining a more generalized discontent through the lens of one woman’s pain, the writer and director, Paul Harrill, concentrates instead on the ordinary details that constitute a life and the way small choices nudge us toward larger ones.
  6. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
    [A] dryly funny, enigmatic new work.
  7. Preservation
    Like his ill-fated hunting party, Mr. Denham’s plans for his thriller don’t turn out quite the way he’d hoped.
  8. The World Made Straight
    The finale, in which blood rivalries are redressed in an absurdly literal manner, fatally strains credulity.
  9. Black November
    There’s a go-for-broke vigor to the way Mr. Amata cuts to the conflict in most scenes, but the heavy-handedness across the board imposes some significant limitations. Mr. Amata, though, pulls no punches with his ending.
  10. Dark Summer
    Despite Mr. Stormare’s valiant efforts, “Dark Summer” (directed by Paul Solet) feels listlessly plotted and insipidly performed.
  11. Predestination
    Mr. Hawke serves as both the narrator and the story’s ballast amid all the woo-woo interludes and disruptions, the puzzle piece you hold and worry about even as the scenery changes and identities shift.
  12. Beloved Sisters
    With its dearth of substance and its wandering focus, this is a middlebrow bodice-ripper posing as an epic that hasn’t the foggiest idea of what it wants to say.
  13. The Taking of Tiger Mountain
    The movie has a nationalistic, didactic flavor and a tiresome devotion to spectacle. Even the climax is staged two ways.
  14. Li'l Quinquin
    The physical beauty of Li’l Quinquin tells me that beneath what could be interpreted as contemptuous misanthropy is a bedrock of stern compassion.
  15. The Search for General Tso
    Mr. Cheney’s movie, while teasing at times, does its celebrating and debunking in mild-mannered fashion, making points without seeming to try to score them.
  16. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    The director, Tom Harper, seems less interested in allegory than in monotonous, conventional goosing, the kind that involves flickering lights and a creaky rocking chair.
  17. A Most Violent Year
    J. C. Chandor, the writer and director of this pulpy, meaty, altogether terrific new film, and Bradford Young, its supremely talented director of photography, succeed in giving this beat-up version of the city both historical credibility and expressive power.
  18. PK
    Mr. Hirani remains an excellent storyteller, weaving his disparate story strands into a convincing, satisfying whole — a rare Bollywood feat.
  19. Barbecue
    Mr. Wilson’s Antoine is too much of a pill to root for, and the voice-over and wispy songs dribbling over scenes only underline the forgettable filmmaking.
  20. The Interview
    The Interview is pretty much what everyone thought it would be before all the trouble started: a goofy, strenuously naughty, hit-and-miss farce, propelled not by any particular political ideas but by the usual spectacle of male sexual, emotional and existential confusion.
  21. Big Eyes
    Trying to do Margaret justice, Mr. Burton can’t prevent himself (and Mr. Waltz) from upstaging her.
  22. American Sniper
    Less a war movie than a western — the story of a lone gunslinger facing down his nemesis in a dusty, lawless place — it is blunt and effective, though also troubling.
  23. The Gambler
    Mr. Wyatt’s direction is smooth, although he’s more confident, and the movie more convincing, when he goes for baroque with the story’s excesses.
  24. Leviathan
    The director, Andrey Zvyagintsev, has a heavenly eye but a leaden hand, and his movie is as heavy as it is transporting, filled with stirring shots of the natural world and deep dives into a human realm flooded with tears and vodka.
  25. Into the Woods
    Into the Woods, the splendid Disney screen adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical, infuses new vitality into the tired marketing concept of entertainment for “children of all ages.” That usually translates to mean only children and their doting parents. But with Into the Woods, you grow up with the characters, young and old, in a lifelong process of self-discovery.
  26. Unbroken
    What the movie ends up in desperate need of is a sense of life made real and palpable through dreadful, transporting details, not a life embalmed in hagiographic awe.
  27. Selma
    Even if you think you know what’s coming, Selma hums with suspense and surprise. Packed with incident and overflowing with fascinating characters, it is a triumph of efficient, emphatic cinematic storytelling. And much more than that, of course.
  28. Two Days, One Night
    Her shoulders slumped, her eyes weary, her gait heavy, Ms. Cotillard moves past naturalism into something impossible to doubt and hard to describe. Sandra is an ordinary person in mundane circumstances, but her story, plainly and deliberately told, is suspenseful, sobering and, in the original, fear-of-God sense of the word, tremendous.
  29. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb
    It’s a chronically underachieving movie, but relatively amusing in its quaint wish fulfillment.
  30. Winter Sleep
    Mr. Ceylan performs this particular operation with rigorous solemnity, technical virtuosity and precision tools — his lapidary visual style rises to the challenge of the natural environment — yet there’s something missing from the very start, namely the spark of breathed-in life.
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