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. At its grungy heart, Alessandro Celli’s Mondocane is about the dissolution of a friendship. Yet this cynical, near-future crime thriller, with its Hunger Games morality and Mad Max aesthetic, is too busy glamorizing cruelty to allow its central relationship to resonate.
  2. Its criticisms of patriarchal authority, bureaucratic corruption and superstition in rural India are sharp and unsparing, but its political themes are embedded in a humanism that is at once expansive and specific. The characters don’t deliver a message; their lives are the message.
  3. A wry take on the material that combines animation and live-action comedy, the movie has some of the hip flair and anarchic meta-humor of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” as well as an irreverent, self-referential attitude that’s rather appealing.
  4. True, its hero is a philandering middle-aged novelist; he has an affair with a divine younger woman; and there’s even an imaginary trial where said novelist stands before a jury of women accusing him of misogyny. But, if you can tolerate these passé indulgences, there’s also something slyly compelling about this ethereal, pillow-talk-heavy drama.
  5. Thanks to some good filmmaking decisions, Emergency is rife with tart observations about campus life.
  6. Fellowes manages to navigate Downton Abbey to charm both reactionaries and revolutionaries.
  7. This movie brushes aside a lot of things — the most shocking thing about it is how soggily noncommittal it is.
  8. The film’s early snark turns as cloying and insincere as the cultural doublespeak that it parodies. By the final act, its dialogue is so burdened by inspirational maxims about personal authenticity that it feels as though the script has been hijacked by yearbook quotes.
  9. It is the siblings — their anguish and their anger, as well as the compassion they extend to one another — that drive the narrative.
  10. Excess is the sine qua non of porn, so that’s expected. What is more surprising — and welcome — is how Thyberg engages feminist issues like a woman’s agency while making you laugh, freaking you out and prompting you to squirm.
  11. Heymann situates the notion of celebrity in the context of not just performance and gay culture but also familial intimacy, with striking detail.
  12. The three-part scope is ambitious, but Foxhole is a film made on a very small scale.
  13. Skillfully merging menace and sweetness (when Anna begins to speak, her parents’ delight is incredibly touching), The Innocents constructs a superbly eerie moral landscape, one that the children (all of whom are fantastic) must learn to navigate.
  14. If this spin on the tale is not quite diverting enough to justify its existence, the movie, directed by Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, is at least not a soulless exercise.
  15. The ebullient history — which also cites on-site food tents as a mind-blowing component of the fest’s appeal — becomes tearful when Hurricane Katrina decimates New Orleans in 2005.
  16. Operation Mincemeat is overall light on remorse and far more interested in intrigue, both political and romantic.
  17. Frammartino connects the physical with the metaphysical. The world as he renders it is an anthology of concrete objects and unrepeatable moments that are somehow infused with abstract, even spiritual meanings.
  18. When Montana Story works, you are effortlessly drawn into a world — which allows you to go with the easygoing, realist groove — even as you’re taking stock of the artifice and waiting for the hammer to fall.
  19. The film’s still, square images feel so much like paintings that any stray movement — the smoke rising in spirals from a mosquito coil, or a palm tree swaying in the breeze — can seem like magic, a picture come to life.
  20. Michael John Warren’s film is a sure-handed blend of making-of explainer, theater-kid scrapbook and jukebox documentary, doling out hits from its theatrical run (through clips) and the reunion.
  21. It would be a bracing, haunting work even if it weren’t so timely.
  22. Such a breezy, Instagram-friendly adaptation feels like a betrayal to Dessen’s original, neurotic protagonist, who has a more difficult journey from self-induced solitude to romance.
  23. Throughout, Diwan’s gaze remains clear, direct, fearless. She shows you a part of life that the movies rarely do. By which I mean: She shows you a woman who desires, desires to learn, have sex, bear children on her terms, be sovereign — a woman who, in choosing to live her life, risks becoming a criminal and dares to be free.
  24. Even the sight of the two frenemies wiping out racist goons is not enough to make up for the desperately frantic action scenes (hope you like interminable car chases), joyless jokes and hackneyed clichés.
  25. Rhoads comes off as a pleasant guy (never a big partyer; he tried to counsel Osbourne on his excessive drinking) and a genuine ax savant who died with a lot more music in him.
  26. “It is belief as much as anything that allows one to cling to a wall,” James Salter wrote in his mountaineering novel “Solo Faces.” The Sanctity of Space is at its best when conveying the power of that belief.
  27. Crow herself is a more than interesting subject. She’s a musician whose Rock-with-a-capital-R cred — her guitar playing is ace, her voice is soulful and her ear for a hook is unimpeachable — is sometimes overlooked in favor of her pop appeal. And her story has a lot of twists.
  28. The tone is too rigidly intellectual for the movie to succeed as a tense thriller. But the actors are up to the challenge of not so much sharing scenes as coexisting within them, particularly Timoteo as the embittered wife who roils like a teakettle that has been welded shut.
  29. With Shepherd, the Welsh writer and director Russell Owen shows us how to accrue a great deal of atmosphere with very little fuss.
  30. The secret is poised somewhere between triteness and disarming simplicity.

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