The New Yorker's Scores

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For 3,480 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 1.1 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: 1,939 out of 3480
  2. Mixed: 1,343 out of 3480
  3. Negative: 198 out of 3480
3480 movie reviews
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  1. A Hero
    By a useful coincidence, A Hero arrives in cinemas (for viewers hardy enough to visit them) in the wake of Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Watch one after the other and you may decide, as I did, that A Hero is the more Shakespearean of the two. Coen’s film is powerful but hermetic, sealed off within its stylized designs, whereas Farhadi reaches back to The Merchant of Venice and pulls the play’s impassioned arguments into the melee of the here and now.
  2. Don't Look Up
    McKay has a point, though his frame of reference hardly stretches beyond the United States, and the stink of localized political contempt all but overpowers the plot.
  3. Parallel Mothers
    Here is Cruz at her least showy and yet her most adventurous, allowing a storm of confusion to sweep across her face as she sits at a café table, and guiding us through the stages of one woman’s self-possession: having it, losing it almost completely, and then reclaiming it.
  4. The Matrix Resurrections
    The action and the effects, so gleamingly creative in the original trilogy, are now C.G.I. commonplaces and “John Wick” retreads—and are approached as such. The duels and battles are whipped up with a sense of obligation and filmed with little verve.
  5. The Lost Daughter
    It’s a movie that, in adapting a novel by Ferrante, indicates the grievous lack in the current cinema of dramas that do what is done all the time in literary fiction: consider women’s lives in intimate detail and in the light of wide-ranging, deep-rooted experience.
  6. The Tragedy of Macbeth
    The over-all effect is of a striving toward a high style that isn’t achieved—and that undercuts the mighty import of the play.
  7. Nightmare Alley
    The film’s overbearing effort to say something serious about society at large seems to force del Toro’s directorial hand. It pushes him to up the razzle-dazzle in order to keep the didactic element entertaining. The result is a movie that is bloated in length, literal in its messaging, and overdecorated, like a cinematic Christmas tree, with dutiful dramatics that leach it of tension, energy, and spontaneity.
  8. Red Rocket
    Red Rocket is over-plotted, over-aestheticized, under-characterized, and under-observed.
  9. West Side Story
    Spielberg’s panache and command are evident in every nook of this handsome film. Yet somehow it feels dutiful, and the duty weighs it down (more so, unexpectedly, than was the case with Lincoln, from 2012, which Kushner also wrote). Homage to one classic is paid in the strenuous bid to become another.
  10. Being the Ricardos
    In peeling away the myths of pop culture and its lovable celebrities, Sorkin reveals the source of its mighty and lasting power.
  11. I Was a Simple Man
    Yogi unfolds the characters’ intimate stories and the region’s history in sharply textured details and rapturous images; he blends social practicalities and metaphysical mysteries with a serene, straightforward astonishment.
  12. Listening to Kenny G
    Listening to Kenny G subtly and surely teases out the mighty and overarching idea of the inseparability of the artist and the art, the notion of art as the embodiment of the artist’s personality—for better or for worse.
  13. Licorice Pizza
    It is, indeed, Anderson’s happiest creation to date—blithe, easy-breathing, and expansive. The odd thing is that, in terms of space and time, it’s what Bowie would have called a god-awful small affair.
  14. Joji
    Long before the plot is resolved, Joji offers a sardonic vision of patriarchal tyranny and the pathologies it spawns—and the obvious artifice of the ending declares, with bitter irony, that there’s no end in sight.
  15. Belfast
    What Branagh has made is a kind of home movie writ large. It is a private stash of memories and imaginings, which touches only glancingly on the wide and troubled world beyond, and which feels most alive when it turns to face the consolations of home and the thrills that lie in wait on the big screen.
  16. The Hand of God
    The Hand of God is most affecting when reality does intrude—not only when fate takes a terrible hand, piercing the family’s heart, but also in stretches of languor.
  17. Drive My Car
    It’s one of the great movies about the continuity of art and life, about the back-and-forth flow between personal relationships and artistic achievements—and about the artifices and agonized secrets on which both depend.
  18. House of Gucci
    House of Gucci is Gaga’s movie, and she tears into it with an exuberant yet precise ferocity. She is the main reason why the movie at times transcends the limits of its scripted action.
  19. Procession
    Like Shoah, Procession does more than bear witness to atrocities; it uses the artistic power of the cinema to inscribe them in history.
  20. The Power of the Dog
    Though Cumberbatch, too, can be compelling, and though you constantly wonder what is stored in reserve behind his wintry gaze, he is at heart a master of urbanity, and not everyone will be convinced that he’s truly at home on the range. Still, you should certainly seek out the movie, and relish its central standoff.
  21. King Richard
    What makes Green’s film so persuasive is that other characters—above all, the redoubtable Brandi Williams—are alive to everything that’s absurd and overbearing, as well as noble, in the hero’s cause.
  22. C'mon C'mon
    C’mon C’mon is a tender and turbulent melodrama that amplifies its power with a documentary current. The result is a film of an extraordinary amplitude; it’s both poised and frenetic, contemplative and active, heartily sentimental and astringently contentious, intensively intimate and expansively world-embracing, exactingly composed and wildly spontaneous.
  23. tick, tick...Boom!
    Unfortunately, Garfield isn’t a musical force of nature or anything close. His mere sufficiency in that department is the wavering note to which the entire movie is tuned and which, for all its many virtues, makes the film slip away from its emotional center.
  24. Uppercase Print
    Jude, with his multiple dimensions of inquiry and imagination, poses philosophical questions about conscience and consciousness, media consumption and social order, that reach far beyond the case and era at hand to challenge the deceptions and delusions of ostensible present-day democracies.
  25. Passing
    Passing is a drama of vision and of inner vision, of appearances and images and self-images, and Hall’s spare and reserved cinematic style serves to emphasize the inward aspect of the action, its crises of consciousness.
  26. Eternals
    Regardless of Zhao’s (and Marvel’s) intentions, Eternals is a parade of faces without experience, a movie that reaches back and forth through history and comes back empty-handed.
  27. Hive
    If you doubt that any movie could pay more exhaustive attention to its heroine than Spencer does, try Hive.
  28. Spencer
    Unbalanced and unjust, Spencer is nonetheless perversely gripping. It dares to unbend, playing the angry fool amid kings-to-be, queens, princes, princesses, and all that jazz.
  29. A Cop Movie
    Along with its trenchant, revelatory depictions and discussion of police work and related political ills, A Cop Movie pulls these hidden vectors of image-making, opinion-shaping power to the fore.
  30. Last Night in Soho
    Unlike the films of such great modern stylists as Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and the three Ter(r)ences—Davies, Malick, and Nance—Wright’s movie offers an illustrated screenplay, in which images deliver and adorn the text rather than embody its ideas.
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