The New York Times' Scores

For 20,269 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:
20269 movie reviews
  1. “Four Winters” offers an enduring warning amid today’s global struggle with authoritarian forces: As one speaker explains, her neighbors were already antisemitic before the war, but with power, they became vicious.
  2. Do Revenge, directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, is a playful, sharp-fanged satire that feels like the ’90s teen comedy hammered into modern emojis: crown, knife, fire, winky face.
  3. Though Drifting Home delivers a great visual concept . . . it doesn’t deliver on the action. The pacing lags and the beats are predictable; the film’s go-to antic is having children repeatedly topple overboard.
  4. It’s all pretty predictable . . . This has the effect of making the finale, which actually takes an exit ramp off triumphalist clichés, genuinely surprising.
  5. The movie works best when it doesn’t over-explain and instead lets the land and the characters, the wide open spaces and the performances — especially Newton’s meticulously controlled turn — speak for themselves.
  6. It’s less a biography than a séance.
  7. There is some sex and plenty of gore, but mostly an atmosphere of feverish, lurid melodrama leavened with winks of knowing humor and held together by Goth’s utterly earnest and wondrously bizarre performance.
  8. The kinetic action adventure The Woman King is a sweeping entertainment, but it’s also a story of unwavering resistance in front of and behind the camera.
  9. Whatever is or isn’t broken about the twins remains a secret, but June and Jennifer’s story is played by Wright and Lawrance with the thoughtful consideration these real-life women deserve.
  10. Despite these flashes of timidity and an overlong running time, the musical is a fun romp with plenty of, ahem, killer tunes.
  11. Drawn from Syms’s own experiences as a visual artist, The African Desperate is less an art-school parody as it is a portrait of existential incongruity, where contempt mingles with deep affection.
  12. Hip-hop isn’t dead, the film energetically insists; it’s just been hiding in a Moroccan slum.
  13. This is not an objective film. It is a polemic, a work of activism, a challenge to the viewer.
  14. Kyle Warren’s screenplay is potent enough to generate several moments of suspense, and Watts, an exceptional actor sidelined too often by poor choices, is not the problem here. That would be the decision to jettison the children’s most creative cruelties — and consequently much of the movie’s tension — and a director, Matt Sobel, who’s determined to steer the audience toward a specific interpretation of events.
  15. Getting peeved at Mottola and Hamm’s easygoing efforts would be like getting mad at a cat for sleeping too much.
  16. With a sprightly wit and an all-star cast to bring it to life, the movie manages to be a loving parody of theater gossips, postwar London and Christie’s murder mysteries all at once.
  17. It leads with a teen soap tone, and despite billing itself as a film, feels structurally more like a string of episodes smashed together.
  18. The movie feels shaggily shapeless, as if Rabins and Rose were unsure what, exactly, they were trying to say, or how to get to the mourning prayer that gives their movie its title — and does, eventually, provide an emotional coda.
  19. At once specific and expansive, Dos Estaciones can be described several ways: as a drama, a character study, a meditative exploration of the ravages of globalization. At the same time, part of the movie’s pleasure is how it avoids facile categorization.
  20. Even when the movie wants for tension, it brims with playful style.
  21. It would all be pretty boilerplate, but Mann’s anchoring appeal — his lean into Griffin’s modesty and decency — saves the movie from a sorrier fate.
  22. Here is House of Darkness anyway, a talky, allegorical horror film that delivers plenty of LaBute’s typically sharp irony and observations but little raison d’être. It is sometimes insightful, just not about women, who outnumber the men three to one.
  23. On land and underwater, the verisimilitude of the violence is numbing.
  24. Gliding inexorably from squirmy to sinister to full-on shocking, this icy satire of middle-class mores, confidently directed by Christian Tafdrup, is utterly fearless in its mission to unsettle.
  25. Cousins’s assessments offer plenty to argue with, but it’s possible to enjoy “A New Generation” without agreeing that “Booksmart” “extends the world of film comedy,” as he claims, or that a shot in “It Follows” merits comparison to the camerawork in Michael Snow’s landmark experimental film “La Région Centrale.”
  26. For all the intensity of Krieps’s performance and the power of the piano repertoire, Hold Me Tight proceeds through the mourning process with a strange detachment, using Clarisse’s agony as scaffolding for ideas about memory and storytelling that seem more imposed on life than pulled from it.
  27. Many documentaries have dealt with real-life ambiguity by making it part of their structure and argument. This one treats it as an afterthought.
  28. Despite an intriguing premise, what Kaul actually wants to say here is in need of a lot more fleshing out.
  29. What makes the film’s episodic approach flow is the pulse-sensitive camerawork. It’s worth singling out, because it is the kind that is often described as “intimate” but rarely pulled off with such Maysles-esque aplomb.
  30. Cregger sets up dozens of clichés and pulls them in genuinely surprising directions, brandishing his touchstones: American horror films of the 80s and 90s in the vein of Wes Craven.

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