The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,303 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: 9,393 out of 20303
  2. Mixed: 8,445 out of 20303
  3. Negative: 2,465 out of 20303
20303 movie reviews
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  1. The Foxy Merkins
    Behind its transgressive affectations, The Foxy Merkins is a sweet, playful divertissement.
  2. Pioneer
    Mr. Skjoldbjaerg, who also tapped Norwegian history with his bank robbery re-enactment “Nokas,” doesn’t convey a creeping atmosphere of moral rot so much as an irksome glumness.
  3. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
    The film is accessible and often hypnotic on an intuitive level.
  4. Concerning Violence
    The energy here feels more like that of a lecture than of a film; it’s an analytical tonic that’s potent to the point of bitter.
  5. Ungli
    While Mr. D’Silva’s basic structure and pacing are fairly fluid, his movie suffers from Bollywood’s typical kitchen-sink approach to filmmaking.
  6. Still Alice
    The test of realism in a movie like this — the thing that would separate it from a conventional, made-for-television disease melodrama — is whether you can imagine lives for the secondary characters when they aren’t on screen. Still Alice lacks that kind of thickness.
  7. Miss Julie
    Aside from the change of setting, Ms. Ullmann’s version is quite orthodox. Much more convincing than Mike Figgis’s 1999 screen adaptation, starring Saffron Burrows, it is a grueling slog through a hell of torment, cruelty and suffering.
  8. Zero Motivation
    Everything looks authentic, at least on the surface, from the desert dust to the messy desks and the sad, barren barracks. The characters, however, are largely cartoons, and their day-to-day exchanges are as vaguely defined as their interior lives.
  9. Wild
    In its thrilling disregard for the conventions of commercial cinematic storytelling, Wild reveals what some of us have long suspected: that plot is the enemy of truth, and that images and emotions can carry meaning more effectively than neatly packaged scenes or carefully scripted character arcs.
  10. Touch the Wall
    What Touch the Wall lacks is an inventive or compelling presentation. Heavy with platitudes about goals and attitude, it could easily be a short special on ESPN.
  11. Remote Area Medical
    Remote Area Medical, a documentary about the nonprofit organization of that name, certainly shows you what they look like, in blunt, tooth-decaying detail. But beyond that, it maddeningly refuses to take a stand or explore the questions it raises.
  12. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
    This affectionate documentary is more of a bonbon for longtime fans than an entryway for a broader audience.
  13. The Immortalists
    This sly documentary rises above its speculative hook by shifting to show the very human, and very mortal, sides of these would-be warriors of eternity.
  14. The Historian
    The film ultimately lands uneasily on the line between inside and insular, recalling an old saw about universities: The fights are so fierce because the stakes are so small.
  15. Before I Disappear
    Throughout the movie, you have the feeling of being dragged along on an impromptu journey by a filmmaker who is traveling without the benefit of a GPS device.
  16. Antarctica: A Year on Ice
    The extremes of Antarctica: A Year on Ice might seem routine to fans of nature documentaries, but the photographer and director Anthony Powell produces some dazzling imagery in his droll study of isolation way, way down under.
  17. The Babadook
    The brilliance of The Babadook, beyond Ms. Kent’s skillful deployment of the tried-and-true visual and aural techniques of movie horror, lies in its interlocking ambiguities.
  18. The Imitation Game
    The Imitation Game is a highly conventional movie about a profoundly unusual man. This is not entirely a bad thing.
  19. Women Who Flirt
    The film is exaggerated, ludicrous and simplistic. It shows a towering disdain for both men and women. But Angie and Marco have a certain good-natured charm, and there are some nice shots of Shanghai.
  20. Penguins of Madagascar
    The decision to focus on the series’s comic relief has resulted in the loosest and perhaps funniest film of the brand.
  21. Horrible Bosses 2
    What Horrible Bosses 2 lacks in nasty repartee, it tries to make up for in poorly staged comedy chases and break-ins. It is the Hollywood equivalent of a rambunctious little boy pointing to the toilet and squealing, “Mommy, look what I made!”
  22. Little White Lie
    Few moments in recent nonfiction cinema are as piercing as the one in which Ms. Schwartz asks her mother if she might have settled down with Mr. Parker had he not been black.
  23. Kill Dil
    Kill Dil has excellent songs by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, and one memorable, stakes-clarifying dance sequence that juxtaposes two styles.
  24. The Circle
    The sense of an invisible world being revealed is more potent than the film’s fairly standard portrayal of closeted life.
  25. Food Chains
    This emphatic and empathetic documentary (directed by Sanjay Rawal and narrated by Forest Whitaker) presents the plight of our farm laborers as modern-day slavery.
  26. Flamenco, Flamenco
    When a final shot takes us outdoors to the real world, it’s possible to wonder whether a certain spontaneity, or a different kind of energy, has been missing from Mr. Saura’s immaculately vibrant film.
  27. Extraterrestrial
    Underlying this overlong and overheated enterprise is a surfeit of ambition. Maybe too much.
  28. Monk With a Camera
    This superficial movie plays like a fashion shoot with robes.
  29. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
    Even as Ms. Amirpour draws heavily from various bodies of work with vampirelike hunger, she gives her influences new life by channeling them through other cultural forms, including her chador-cloaked vampire.
  30. Death Metal Angola
    The concert itself was a bold, life-affirming project, but with a couple of additional extended music sequences, Mr. Xido’s film might have been more powerful and way more hardcore.
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