The New Yorker's Scores

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For 3,482 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 37% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 61% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Fiume o morte!
Lowest review score: 0 Bio-Dome
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,940 out of 3482
  2. Mixed: 1,344 out of 3482
  3. Negative: 198 out of 3482
3482 movie reviews
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  1. The Zero Theorem
    All this leaves The Zero Theorem looking both disorderly and stuck. And yet, to my surprise, on returning for a second viewing I found myself moved by the film — by the very doggedness with which it both hunts for and despairs of meaning.
  2. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    “Them” — apart from a few affecting scenes — is a hollow, high-minded folly.
  3. Starred Up
    At first, you may think, Oh, it’s that damn prison movie again, but Starred Up has a much more intimate texture of affection and disdain than most genre films. You’re held by every exchange, every fight.
  4. The Last of Robin Hood
    The Last of Robin Hood, written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, is often pallid and thin.
  5. If I Stay
    The saddest thing about If I Stay is that it affords Moretz so little opportunity to be non-sad.
  6. The Trip to Italy
    They also try to one-up each other as men, vying for professional success and for the attention of the invariably lovely women they meet. Sharks have duller teeth than Coogan and Brydon. Both movies, in fact, are about the impossibility — and the necessity — of male friendship.
  7. Love Is Strange
    Love Is Strange, however, is not about gay marriage. It is about a marriage that happens to be gay. If the film grows slightly boring, even that can be construed as an advance.
  8. Frank
    Best of all, we get to witness Fassbender at full tilt — to revel in that gaunt, El Greco mug of his, which, for all its handsomeness, betrays no sunny side, whether here or amid the shenanigans of “X-Men.”
  9. Get On Up
    This movie will never need reviving. Brown’s innovative rhythms will always make his music sound contemporary.
  10. A Master Builder
    A Master Builder is a bold endeavor, thriftily made, and there is muscle and volume in the performances; but had Demme hung back, and kept things cooler and quieter, the mastery of what Ibsen built, and the agon of his extraordinary hero, would have cast a more looming shadow. [4 Aug. 2014, p.75]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Aug 1, 2014
  11. Calvary
    The tension of Calvary is fitful at best, and much of the movie trips into silliness, but in Brendan Gleeson -- in his proud bearing and his lamenting gaze -- we see the plight of the lonely believer in a world beyond belief. [4 Aug.2014, p.74]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Aug 1, 2014
  12. Magic in the Moonlight
    It's an accomplished, stately movie -- unimpassioned but pleasing. [28 July 2014, p.78]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Jul 24, 2014
  13. A Most Wanted Man
    Still, it's le Carre's material; it was shot in dark, lurid, vital Hamburg; Hoffman is the star; and I was completely held. [28 July 2014, p.79]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Jul 24, 2014
  14. Boyhood
    The profuse pleasures of Boyhood spring not from amazement but from recognition — from saying, Yes, that’s true, and that feels right, or that’s how it was for me, too.
  15. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    What is missing from the film is wit—the deep wit that comes from playing off species and environments against each other.
  16. Begin Again
    Sappy but engaging. [7 & 14 July 2014, p.95]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Jul 5, 2014
  17. Snowpiercer
    If you don't mind the gore, you can enjoy Snowpiercer as a brutal and imaginative piece of science-fiction filmmaking. [7 & 14 July 2014, p.94]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Jul 5, 2014
  18. Venus in Fur
    Miraculously, he (Polanski) brightens the faded material, and conjures his most graceful work in years.
  19. Jersey Boys
    Sparks like that are scattered through, and yet the sad fact is that Jersey Boys is a mess. Parts of it feel half-finished.
  20. Third Person
    The revelation is Wilde. A slender beauty with high cheekbones, she makes Anna a full-fledged neurotic, candid and demanding and changeable, shifting abruptly from snuggling happiness to angry defiance.
  21. 22 Jump Street
    22 Jump Street is hardly fresh, but the picture has enough energy to get by.
  22. Night Moves
    What happens at the dam, filmed at night, with only shimmering light, is the most nerve-racking sequence in recent movies. Reichardt, despite the film’s absences, has achieved an impressive control over the medium.
  23. The Double
    The movie, bad as it is, will do as a demonstration of a talented man’s freedom to choose different ways of being himself.
  24. Godzilla
    Skip Godzilla the movie. Watch the trailer.
  25. Belle
    The movie is a moralized historical fantasy, mixing love and politics in Old Hollywood style. Yet I can’t bring myself to be indignant about its inventions. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who was born in Oxford and has acted since she was a child, speaks her lines with tremulous emotion and, finally, radiant authority. Austen, I think, would have been thrilled.
  26. The Immigrant
    In this movie, Phoenix turns himself inside out, but Cotillard’s reserved performance doesn’t move us. Bruno advances in his confused way, Ewa resists, and, despite Jeremy Renner’s flickering presence, the movie becomes dour and repetitive. Looking at them, you finally think, Enough! Life must be elsewhere.
  27. Young & Beautiful
    His (Francois Ozon) theme could hardly be less original (think of "Bonjour Tristesse"), but the tautness is that of a horror film. [5 May 2014, p.85]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Apr 30, 2014
  28. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    Suffice to say that even he (one of our finest actors) is trapped by the miasma of unsubtlety that creeps into the film and causes all involved to lose their professional bearings. [5 May 2014, p.84]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Apr 30, 2014
  29. Transcendence
    Transcendence is a muddle; it takes more creative energy than this to catch up to the present. [28 April 2014, p.86]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Apr 27, 2014
  30. Blue Ruin
    It's only at the end of Blue Ruin that my pleasure drained away. [28 April 2014, p.86]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Apr 27, 2014
  31. Draft Day
    This literal-minded movie sells old pieties and washes away fear so thoroughly that it creates a new kind of fantasy, in which all's right with a very troubled world. [21 April 2014, p.110]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Apr 16, 2014
  32. Under the Skin
    Glazer is nothing if not ambitious; the rough edge of naturalism, on the streets, slices into the more controlled and stylized look of science fiction, and the result seems both to drift and to gather to a point of almost painful intensity.
  33. Joe
    Yet Joe, directed by David Gordon Green, succeeds. Although Green's resume has been as up and down as that of his leading man, his eye for decay has rarely blurred; and now, you sense, he has come to the right place. [14 April 2014, p.87]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Apr 12, 2014
  34. Only Lovers Left Alive
    Here is the territory that "Twilight" never dared to enter. It was so busy with crushes, covens, werewolves, and all the other moth-eaten trappings of the genre that it forgot to ask, Why do vampires not die of boredom? Is time not the sharpest stake in the heart? [14 April 2014, p.86]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Apr 12, 2014
  35. Dom Hemingway
    Jude Law, saying farewell once again to his youthful good looks (Dom has scars and a little too much weight), makes this hyper-articulate ruffian the most intricately soulful character in current movies. [7 April 2014, p.75]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Apr 9, 2014
  36. Noah
    Noah may not make much sense, but only an artist could have made it. [7 April 2014, p.74]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Apr 9, 2014
  37. The French Minister
    This is not life imitating art. This is art going to bed with life and staying there for the rest of the afternoon. [31 March 2014, p.81]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Mar 27, 2014
  38. Finding Vivian Maier
    Even as this fine documentary unveils the "mystery woman," as she once described herself, it remains intent on the molding of her myth. [31 March 2014, p.80]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Mar 27, 2014
  39. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    Like most porn, even art porn, Nymphomaniac falls apart at the end. Von trier even seems to be pranking the audience. But the director has at last created a genuine scandal -- a provocation worth talking about. [24 March 2014, p.84]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Mar 24, 2014
  40. Enemy
    Enemy may crawl and infuriate, and, boy, does Villeneuve get rid of the grin. But the film sticks with you, like a dreadful dream or a spider in the bedclothes. Shake it off, and it's still there. [17 March 2014, p.78]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Mar 14, 2014
  41. Le Week-End
    The monologue that Goldblum delivers there, grand with illusion and larded with mouthfuls of canapes, is entirely delicious -- roguish and absurd, but lending the film a zest that it was in danger of losing. [17 March 2014, p.79]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Mar 14, 2014
  42. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    The Grand Budapest Hotel is no more than mildly funny. It produces murmuring titters rather than laughter -- the sound of viewers affirming their own acumen in so reliably getting the joke. [10 March 2014, p.78]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Mar 6, 2014
  43. The LEGO Movie
    As a rule, movies about toys need to be approached with extreme caution; some of them have been bad enough to count as health hazards. This one is the exception.
  44. The Last of the Unjust
    In short, The Last of the Unjust is every bit as quarrelsome as it should be. Murmelstein, recounting the circumstances in which he took mortally serious decisions, dares to ask us if we could have done any better.
  45. Ride Along
    Nothing in the movie makes sense, but I prefer to think that Ride Along is just a badly told joke, rather than an insult to its audience.
  46. Generation War
    While re-creating the vast swing of German forces in and out of Russia, Kadelbach tries to capture the inner turmoil of two men. Call it half a victory.
  47. Like Father, Like Son
    There are passages of gravity and grace here that few other directors could unfurl. [27 Jan. 2014, p. 78]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Jan 22, 2014
  48. Stranger by the Lake
    Stranger by the Lake, it must be said, flirts with monotony. There is something both fascinating and numbing in the rituals on display, and in the matching rhythm of the film's approach. [27 Jan.2014, p.79]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Jan 22, 2014
  49. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    Shadow Recruit is fun in a minor, winter-season way. If the producers stick with Chris Pine as he ages, they may end up with something worth caring about. [20 Jan.2014, p.78]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Jan 18, 2014
  50. Gloria
    At the end of the movie, when Gloria looks at herself appraisingly in a mirror, we seem to be seeing her for the first time. [20 Jan. 2014, p.79]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Jan 18, 2014
  51. The Selfish Giant
    From the beginning, you can feel this restive, pulsing movie burn from discontent toward disaster. The whole thing should sap the spirit, and make you despair of a lost and wasted country, yet you are constantly shocked awake by the energy of Arbor, whether it is spent on insolence, initiative, or grief. The boy’s a bright wire.
  52. Labor Day
    You can love the look of the movie and still not believe a single word of it. To be fair, the climax is surprisingly touching; somehow, the residents of this cooked-up tale manage to earn our pity and support.
  53. Lone Survivor
    Lone Survivor will not please people exasperated by an endless war, but it's an achievement nonetheless. [6 Jan. 2014, p. 73]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Jan 6, 2014
  54. The Invisible Woman
    Fiennes and his team have mounted a handsome re-creation of Victorian England, but the Dickens-Ternan affair isn't much of a story -- at least, not as realized here. [6 Jan. 2014, p.73]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Jan 6, 2014
  55. August: Osage County
    As you watch, you don't think of the decline of American civilization; you think that these are good actors giving themselves a hell of a workout in a misbegotten movie. [6 Jan. 2014, p.72]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Jan 6, 2014
  56. The Past
    [Farhadi's] gift for pulling us deep into the story, and for conveying the major burdens of these supposedly minor lives, is unimpaired.
  57. The Wolf of Wall Street
    The Wolf of Wall Street is a fake. It’s meant to be an exposé of disgusting, immoral, corrupt, obscene behavior, but it’s made in such an exultant style that it becomes an example of disgusting, obscene filmmaking. It’s actually a little monotonous; spectacular, and energetic beyond belief, but monotonous in the way that all burlesques become monotonous after a while.
  58. Saving Mr. Banks
    The director is John Lee Hancock, who does what he did with “The Blind Side,” where he commandeered a true and jagged tale, tidied up the trauma, and made sure that everyone lived sappily ever after. Sandra Bullock carried the day then, and now Emma Thompson repeats the process.
  59. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    The result may be the oddest film of the season. It boasts an array of sublime backdrops and a yearning score, but the climate of feeling is anxious and inward, encapsulated in Stiller’s darting gaze, and the movie itself keeps glancing backward, at the lost and the obsolete.
  60. Her
    Sad, kooky, and daunting in equal measure, Her is the right film at the right time.
  61. American Hustle
    “Inside Llewyn Davis” and “Nebraska” are the current standards of what a serious Hollywood movie looks like. American Hustle offers so many easy pleasures that people may not think of it as a work of art, but it is. In the world that Russell has created, if you don’t come to play you’re not fully alive. An art devoted to appetite has as much right to screen immortality as the most austere formal invention.
  62. Frozen
    Extravagant care is taken with minutiae, and the directors, Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, whistle through the first twenty minutes of the plot with a controlled giddiness that would leave many live-action adventures staggering in their tracks. Yet what a curious plot it is.
  63. Inside Llewyn Davis
    If you love the Coens, or follow folk music, or hold fast to this period of history and that patch of New York, then the film can hardly help striking a chord.
  64. The Armstrong Lie
    The Armstrong Lie goes on forever, perhaps because Gibney can’t believe that, like everyone else, he’s been had. Again and again, he looks for elements of moral clarity (never mind remorse) in Armstrong, and the cyclist looks back at Gibney (and at us) as if he were a fool.
  65. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    Yet, despite the good acting, the middle section of the film, set at the Capitol, is attenuated and rhythmless — the filmmakers seem to be touching all the bases so that the trilogy’s readers won’t miss anything.
  66. The Great Beauty
    Henry James, who loved the place, accused himself of "making a mere Rome of words, talking of a Rome of my own which was no Rome of reality." Sorrentino has made a Rome of images, and taken the same risk. But it was worth it. [25 Nov. 2013, p.134]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Nov 22, 2013
  67. Philomena
    What could be a plain tale -- and is in danger of becoming a sappy one -- grows surprisingly inward and dense. [25 Nov. 2013, p.135]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Nov 22, 2013
  68. At Berkeley
    I can’t think of another film portrait of higher education that matches this one for comprehensiveness, intellectual depth, and hope.
  69. Nebraska
    Bob Nelson wrote the script, which Payne has been mulling over for nine years, and some of it, enhanced by the deliberate pacing of his direction, is funny in a deadpan, black-comedy way. But the absurdist atmosphere feels thin: the movie is like a Beckett play without the metaphysical unease, the flickering blasphemies and revelations.
  70. The Broken Circle Breakdown
    Heldenbergh owns the role, holding the camera's gaze with ease. The look and the sound of him hark back to Kris Kristofferson, but there is a hint of Nick Nolte, too, around the eyes--unfazed by the world, yet easily bewildered by its wiles. [11 Nov. 2013, p.91]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Nov 6, 2013
  71. About Time
    What Rachel McAdams is doing in this nonsense is anyone's guess, but she must realize that the long journey from "Mean Girls" to Mary, with her mousy bangs and her timid pleas counts as a serious descent. [11 Nov. 2013, p.90]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Nov 6, 2013
  72. Dallas Buyers Club
    As the real-life Ronald Woodroof, he (Mcconaughey) does work that is pretty much astounding. [4 Nov. 2013, p.116]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Oct 31, 2013
  73. Blue Is the Warmest Color
    The most consuming and most exhausting of its kind since “The Dreamlife of Angels,” fifteen years ago. From the moment when Adèle first catches sight of Emma, on a busy crosswalk, the movie restores your faith in the power of the coup de foudre and yet redoubles your fear of its effect; love, like lightning, can both illuminate and scorch. The problems of two little people, it turns out, do indeed amount to a hill of beans. Some hill. Some beans.
  74. All Is Lost
    Unimaginable as anything but a movie. It’s largely wordless, sombrely spectacular, vast and intimate at the same time, with a commitment to detailed physical reality that commands amazed attention for a tight hundred minutes.
  75. 12 Years a Slave
    12 Years a Slave is easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery.
  76. Parkland
    And so, as the solemnity of the enterprise is frittered away, you feel moved to ask: what is this film for?
  77. Captain Phillips
    Why, then, do we not feel bullied by the result? Partly because the camera, as I say, tells a subtler tale than the dialogue does, and lures us into a grudging respect for the bravado of Muse and his men; but mainly because of Tom Hanks. This most likable of actors deliberately presents us with a character who makes no effort to be liked.
  78. Enough Said
    It's a movie that approaches novelistic richness. [7 Oct. 2013, p. 89]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Oct 6, 2013
  79. Gravity
    Gravity is not a film of ideas, like Kubrick's techno-mystical "2001," but it's an overwhelming physical experience -- a challenge to the senses that engages every kind of dread. [7 Oct. 2013, p.88]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Oct 6, 2013
  80. Thanks for Sharing
    Thanks for Sharing is worth it, because of Pink. [30 Sept. 2013, p.85]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Sep 27, 2013
  81. Rush
    Still, it is a writer's privilege to trim and tailor at will, and everybody loves a duel. It would take the dullest of curmudgeons not to enjoy the surge of this saga, accurate or not, and the excesses of what already feels like a distant age. [30 Sept. 2013, p.84]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Sep 27, 2013
  82. Wadjda
    Al Mansour is too smart to overdo the symbolic spin, but the thrust of her film, toward the end, could hardly be more urgent. [16 Sept. 2013, p. 72]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Sep 16, 2013
  83. Riddick
    And that's it, really: two hours of loneliness, interleaved with havoc. The dialogue has been distilled to expletives and grunts. [16 Sept. 2013, p.74]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Sep 16, 2013
  84. Salinger
    The movie is like a monstrous balloon that keeps re-inflating. If Salinger were around, he would reach for a pin.
  85. Prisoners
    Villeneuve has what I keep looking for in directors: a charged sense of the way the world actually works.
  86. The Grandmaster
    A superb martial discipline has ended in a commercial movie genre--not the worst fate in the world, but the comic irony of it is of little interest to a director bent on glorification. [9 Sept. 2013, p.90]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Sep 6, 2013
  87. Drinking Buddies
    Citing Chekhov at this early time in Swanberg's career may be unfair, but an amiable movie like Drinking Buddies cried out for the revelations that a great dramatist--or even a talented screenwriter and director working together--can give us. [9 Sept. 2013, p.90]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Sep 6, 2013
  88. Our Nixon
    Watergate has never really gone away for those of us who lived through it, and, in Penny Lane's Our Nixon, a shrewdly edited collection of news footage and "home movies" taken by members of the Nixon White House staff, there they are again, our familiars. [9 Sept.2013, p.91]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Sep 6, 2013
  89. The World's End
    Nothing here is so well defined, and the tone of the film begins to suffer. I cannot imagine returning to it as one does to "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," hungry for fresh minutiae. [2 Sept. 2013, p.80]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Aug 31, 2013
  90. Austenland
    So lazy is the characterization, so hamstrung the plot, and so chronically broad the overacting that the main interest lies in deciding which to block first, your eyes or your ears. [2 Sept. 2013, p.81]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Aug 31, 2013
  91. Lovelace
    Peter Sarsgaard, with an oozing voice and a wolfish smile, is a terrific creep, and Hank Azaria and Bobby Cannavale have fun overplaying porn-world figures, but the movie, at its center, remains unawakened.
  92. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    The Butler is a lightweight, didactic movie, a kind of well-produced high-school entertainment.
  93. Our Children
    There is no whodunit here — the horror is plain in the opening shots — and the how is presented with great restraint, but the why remains veiled and mysterious long after the film has ended.
  94. Elysium
    At last, a good big film. The legacy of the summer, thus far, has been jetsam: moribund movies that lie there, bloated and beached, gasping to break even. But here is something angry and alive: Elysium.
  95. The Canyons
    The Canyons is not porn, but it has the demoralized second-rateness and the lowlife inanity of the porn world.
  96. The To Do List
    It’s good-natured and raucous, with many scenes that are just sketched but a few that are truly funny.
  97. The Spectacular Now
    The Spectacular Now goes a little soft at the end, but most of it has the melancholy sense of life just passing by — until, that is, someone has the courage to grab it and make it take some meaning and form.
  98. Fruitvale Station
    Fruitvale Station is a confident, touching, and, finally, shattering directorial début.
  99. Blue Jasmine
    Cate Blanchett, who played Blanche on Broadway only a few years ago, gives the most complicated and demanding performance of her movie career. The actress, like her character, is out on a limb much of the time, but there’s humor in Blanchett’s work, and a touch of self-mockery as well as an eloquent sadness.
  100. The Act of Killing
    The project gave me pause. Although Oppenheimer has called it “a documentary of the imagination,” whatever that means, would a measure of investigation have spoiled it? We hear that Congo personally exterminated a thousand people. Does that figure stand up, and does it not matter more than his dawning remorse? There is no disputing that we are right at the heart of darkness, but around it is a larger body of evidence, which awaits another explorer.
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