The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Drive Hard
    Airless, senseless — and seemingly endless — this clumsy heist movie, directed by the prolific schlockmaster Brian Trenchard-Smith, manages to make even the magnificent coastline of Queensland, Australia, feel dreary.
  2. The Hero of Color City
    The Hero of Color City cannily distills the children’s movie to its lowest common denominator: bright colors flashing on screen.
  3. Stephen King’s A Good Marriage
    While the director, Peter Askin, employs an all-too-customary suspense arsenal (vertiginous stairway perspectives, foreboding thunderstorms, ominous headlights), Mr. King’s script offers a wealth of behavioral details.
  4. Copenhagen
    Mark Raso’s first feature, Copenhagen, takes on a taboo — great for high-stakes storytelling, if it’s not used to generate empty shock. Worry not: His absorbing film has a delicate nuance that will linger after the popcorn’s gone.
  5. The Blue Room
    Mr. Amalric, who directed this dark, delectable, shivery tale, adapting it from the Georges Simenon novel, sets its uneasy, dank mood with energetic economy.
  6. Inner Demons
    The main drawback of Inner Demons, no matter how skillful the presentation may be here, is the overriding sense that this has all been done before.
  7. Fishing Without Nets
    Fishing Without Nets turns the hijacking drama into a morally murky contemplation of deprivation and desperation.
  8. Keep On Keepin' On
    Like other stories of musical tutelage, Keep On Keepin’ On is ultimately an examination of the pursuit of greatness. It is a grueling and demanding endeavor, for sure, but also, for Mr. Terry and anyone lucky enough to enter his orbit, a source of unending joy.
  9. The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin
    The fates of several of the movie’s bitcoin entrepreneurs are unlikely to send viewers rushing to exchange their dollars. But The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin nevertheless functions as an entertaining portrait of the unshakable optimism that governs what’s been called a financial Wild West.
  10. Last Hijack
    This film could have been more surely and deftly put together.
  11. The Liberator
    Perhaps most impressive are the resources deployed in shooting this production. As if the film’s ostentatious aerial vistas, merely functional scene-writing and score weren’t distracting enough, Mr. Sexton’s dialogue freezes dead any simulation of the period with tone-deaf lines amid Bolívar’s impassioned rhetoric.
  12. The Supreme Price
    Joanna Lipper’s documentary shapes one country’s recent history into an accessible and tragic family drama.
  13. The Good Lie
    For all its softening, The Good Lie, like “Monsieur Lazhar,” has a core of decency, humanity and good will that feels authentic. You won’t curse yourself for occasionally tearing up.
  14. The Culture High
    Some of this seems like stoner’s paranoia, and some of the film’s talking heads, mainly comedians, don’t make the best advocates. Over all, though, its experts... argue forcefully for decriminalization.
  15. Annabelle
    Annabelle is less cluttered with creepy bric-a-brac than “The Conjuring.” (The original director, James Wan, produced here.) But Mr. Leonetti embraces the potential of negative space.
  16. Left Behind
    The director, Vic Armstrong — whose lengthy résumé hews primarily toward stunt work — displays no facility with actors and even less with pacing.
  17. Nas: Time Is Illmatic
    Despite some conventional moves here and there and a weakness for the cult of genius, the documentary sustains that uneasy mood cast by Nas’s expression as a child on the “Illmatic” cover, sobered by experience and wisdom before his time.
  18. The Decent One
    The voice-over-driven readings and the illustrative footage — unwisely augmented with new sound effects — lack a fundamental filmic momentum.
  19. Men, Women & Children
    Veering between alarmism and cautious reassurance — between technohysteria and shrugging, nothing-new-under-the-sun resignation — Men, Women & Children succumbs to the confusion it tries to illuminate.
  20. It Was You Charlie
    The film is at once overly eccentric and underdeveloped. It starts as an exercise in bleak absurdism and ends as a Frank Capra Christmas special, with little originality in between.
  21. This Ain't No Mouse Music
    It’s Arhoolie’s musicians — Big Mama Thornton, Flaco Jiménez, Michael Doucet of the Cajun band BeauSoleil and others — who are the true stars. I dare you not to tap your feet.
  22. Advanced Style
    Advanced Style is undeniably captivating, even uplifting at times. But Mr. Cohen and Lina Plioplyte, the director, present a disconcerting mixed message.
  23. Print the Legend
    The movie’s biggest entertainment, however, is not the market-share rivalry between MakerBot Industries, in Brooklyn, and the younger Formlabs, in Boston, but its fearless dive into dweeb-culture head space.
  24. Harlem Street Singer
    A labor of love and respect.
  25. Hellaware
    The old story of art as a refuge for scoundrels and callow youth is amusing and updated with assorted details.
  26. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    Mr. Ridley’s ambitions and refusal to treat Hendrix as a solvable mystery are welcome, given how often biopics re-embalm their subjects. Here, a legend is born, and a man too.
  27. Believe Me
    The film’s congeniality, however, in no way dulls its humor or the sharpness of its observations.
  28. Pride
    It is the kind of hearty, blunt-force drama with softened edges that leaves audiences applauding and teary-eyed.
  29. The Boxtrolls
    While The Boxtrolls does follow kiddie-action genre conventions in its big, noisy climax — a hectic brawl of explosions, collisions and oversize machines — it also finds an impressive number of quiet, eccentric and haunting moments along the way.
  30. The Equalizer
    Mr. Fuqua, while not the world’s most subtle filmmaker, directs the action sequences with bluntness and clarity and effectively uses his star as an oasis of calm in a jumpy, nasty universe.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »