The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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: 9,377 out of 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. I Am Not Alone
    The talking heads, who discuss events in the past tense, sap the protest material’s momentum, and a score by Serj Tankian (who appears as a commentator) is unnecessarily manipulative.
  2. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    The Bakkers were many things to many people: appalling, inspiring, laughable, sad. This movie succeeds in making them dull.
  3. The Nowhere Inn
    Formally lively, The Nowhere Inn is a true meta exercise in the sense that the more derivative and self-conscious its conceptual gambits seem (stick around: The reflexivity continues after the end credits), the more it proves its ostensible point.
  4. The Mad Women's Ball
    Laurent has made an elegant if overheated melodrama that amplifies the villainy of Charcot and his colleagues (one proves particularly appalling) to underscore how male-centered the medical establishment was — and is.
  5. Blue Bayou
    Beautifully relaxed family scenes help us forgive the ponderous direction.
  6. Wife of a Spy
    Wife of a Spy is something like linear narrative perfection, with every scene perfectly calibrated.
  7. Prisoners of the Ghostland
    Sono’s visuals, sizzlingly realized by the cinematographer Sohei Tanikawa, lack neither brio nor imagination. But the ludicrousness of the plot severs any emotional connection to a story whose apocalyptic stylings (the Ghostland of the title is a nuclear wasteland) gesture toward Japan and America’s painful history.
  8. Cry Macho
    This one is something different — a deep cut for the die-hards, a hangout movie with nothing much to prove and just enough to say, with a pleasing score (by Mark Mancina) and some lovely desert scenery (shot by Ben Davis). If the old man’s driving, my advice is to get in and enjoy the ride.
  9. Little Girl
    [A] disarmingly sensitive documentary.
  10. My Name Is Pauli Murray
    Indeed, Murray’s story is a remarkable — and extensive — one that the filmmakers stuff into an hour and a half that feels like a dull and disorganized PowerPoint lecture.
  11. Nightbooks
    Its devotion to frights makes it memorable.
  12. Azor
    Written and directed by Andreas Fontana, making a formally precise, tonally perfect feature debut, Azor is a low-key shocker.
  13. Malignant
    None of this is especially scary, but, if you’re patient, Wan delivers the kind of hilariously sick climax that only a sadist would spoil. Or envisage.
  14. Come from Away
    This amiable production’s temperature never rises above lukewarm: good sentiments are, unfortunately, difficult to dramatize, an issue compounded by a score that can feel like aural wallpaper.
  15. Fauci
    Fauci is at its best when it draws parallels between the pandemics that define Dr. Fauci’s career. It vexes when it leans on straightforward biography
  16. The Card Counter
    The solitary man returns in The Card Counter, a haunting, moving story of spirit and flesh, sin and redemption, love and death about another lonely soul, William Tell, who, with pen to paper, grapples with his present and his unspeakable past.
  17. No Responders Left Behind
    While pragmatic in bent, the documentary repeatedly underlines the toxic manner in which this country treats many who have sacrificed body and mind in service to others.
  18. Fire Music
    This concise but cogent documentary directed by Tom Surgal is crammed with exhilarating sounds, moving reminiscences and stimulating arguments that it is not just music, but vital music.
  19. Language Lessons
    The twists in the story are meant to raise the emotional stakes, but they have the opposite effect, undermining the credibility of the premise. The harder the movie leans into its own cleverness, the more it exposes itself as a diverting but ultimately unconvincing exercise.
  20. Dogs
    One can imagine how the particularities of the Romanian bush might yield novel dynamics. Instead, Dogs underplays these elements and commits to the beats of the slow burn thriller in mostly generic form.
  21. Queenpins
    Queenpins might have been a snappy little comedy had it lost 20 minutes and found a point beyond glorifying grand larceny. Erasing the lead character’s smug-perky narration wouldn’t have hurt, either.
  22. Dating & New York
    A winning cast helps sell that familiar premise — not just Reale and Young-White, who have definite chemistry and an easy-flowing banter, but also the brassy, scene-stealing Catherine Cohen.
  23. The Capote Tapes
    There’s some fascinating and provocative material in The Capote Tapes that is diluted by the director Ebs Burnough’s insistence on teasing a question that, arguably, has a self-evident answer.
  24. The Alpinist
    The movie could stand to demystify how some of its most terrifying early shots were filmed. (Later on, we’re told Leclerc agreed to carry a small camera himself to shoot part of a conquest in Patagonia.) But it does capture its subject’s philosophy.
  25. Kate
    The movie presents an eye-catching fantasy of a candy-colored Japanese underworld. But the exoticism feels as cheap as a whiff of a green tea and musk cologne called Tokyo wafting over a department store counter. Even Winstead, stoic in her fashionably boyish haircut, looks bored.
  26. Small Engine Repair
    The film, which Pollono also directs, provides more depth than the original but still flounders in the translation from stage to screen.
  27. Cinderella
    Among the countless iterations the story has weathered through the ages, this Cinderella (streaming on Amazon), starring Camila Cabello as the orphaned maiden, is forgettable. It is oddly transfixing, though, as a study in the semiotics of the modernized fairy tale.
  28. The Big Scary 'S' Word
    Hope is not a policy, as the saying goes, so Bridge gamely tries to provide both, fleshing out ideals with examples.
  29. Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles
    Despite the modern technology, the setting and the sound draws attention to what is retro about this young star’s style, the influences from bossa nova, jazz, and traditional choral music that pop up in her chart-topping records.
  30. Who You Think I Am
    Because much of the rest of the story is so underdeveloped — notably Claire’s intimate life with her frustratingly generic children — the character overwhelms everything, including the fragile realism.
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