The New Yorker's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
For 3,481 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:
3481 movie reviews
  1. The movie is often absorbing, and skillfully played, but, along with its snarling hero, it doesn’t have much time for ordinary folk. By the end, like Marianne, we are left gasping for air.
  2. Everest, in short, suffers from the same problem as Everest: overcrowding.
  3. If Sicario does not collapse under its own grimness, that is because of the pulse: the care with which Villeneuve keeps the story beating, like a drum, as he steadies himself for the next set piece.
  4. With no narrator to shepherd us along, the movie feels noisy and restless. The period is revived by a wealth of songs on the soundtrack, and by the sleek and succulent Panther look.
  5. For some viewers, the acidity level of Perry’s movie will be too high to stomach. For others — anyone who thinks that there are too many warm hugs in Strindberg, for example — Queen of Earth awaits.
  6. Within the vigorous entertainment of Straight Outta Compton is a sharp-minded realism about the machines within the machines, the amplifiers of money and media that, behind the scenes and offscreen, play crucial roles in the flow of power.
  7. While Woody Allen’s recent films have grown ever more hermetic in their perplexity, Baumbach is becoming as prolific, and as quick on the comic draw, as the Allen of yore. Will historians of humor look back on this movie, perhaps, and mark it as the point at which the torch was passed?
  8. The director of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is Guy Ritchie, and there are hints, in the Berlin scenes, that he is tempted by the murkier option. Before long, however, as befits the maker of “Snatch” and “RocknRolla,” he drops the shadowy chic, decamps to Rome, and gets down to silliness.
  9. For a better reckoning of 1968, you need a better writer — Norman Mailer, unloved by Buckley and Vidal alike, whose “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” covered the same events. Next to his fervid look at the sinews of power, as they sweat and flex, Best of Enemies is barely more than a skit.
  10. Anybody hoping that The End of the Tour would mirror the formal dazzle of Wallace’s fiction, doubling back on itself like the frantically probing encounters in his 1999 collection, “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” will be disappointed. Yet the film, despite its flatness, is worth exploring.
  11. Of the many heists and grabs that litter the movie, none is as blatant as the deft, irrepressible manner in which Ferguson, displaying a light smile and a brisk way with a knife, steals the show. Poor Tom Cruise. He can’t even steal a kiss.
  12. The late director Aleksei Guerman’s last film is a grandly arbitrary carnival of neo-medieval depravity. It’s also a mudpunk allegory of Russian barbarism and backwardness.
  13. When the Dostoyevskian drama kicks in, Allen’s venomous speculations take over, and bring to the fore a tangle of ghostly conundrums and ferocious ironies, as if the director, nearing eighty, already had one foot in the next world and were looking back at this one with derision and rue.
  14. The Look of Silence is a simpler work than “The Act of Killing,” and a better one.
  15. Then, there is Thomas the Tank Engine, who gives the most thoughtful performance in the movie. He is part of a train set in the bedroom of Scott’s young daughter, and, as such, he is perfectly adapted to the dimensions of Ant-Man’s world.
  16. Is it robust and plain-speaking, proud of its comic swagger, or is there something tight-mouthed in its imperative, with a hint of “or else” hanging off the end? Either way, the life of Amy is dished up for our inspection.
  17. In truth, Mr. Holmes is not Holmesian at all. It is Jamesian, as shown by a wonderful encounter between Kelmot and Holmes — an attraction of opposites, you might say — on a garden bench.
  18. Baker revels in the power of clichés and the generic energy of his low-fi cinematography, which is done with a cell phone. The results are picturesque and anecdotal.
  19. The director is Debra Granik, who made “Winter’s Bone” (2010), in which Ron had a minor role; the melodramatic strain in that film was less convincing than its observational acuities, which return to the fore here. With no narrator, it is up to the camera to shepherd us through Ron’s days.
  20. Meanwhile, everyone in the theatre is thinking: Given that I paid good money to learn about the world’s most frightening cocaine king, why am I watching a movie about the world’s most stupid Canadian?
  21. On the scale of inventiveness, Inside Out will be hard to top this year. As so often with Pixar, you feel that you are visiting a laboratory crossed with a rainbow.
  22. What fleshes out the movie, and lends it such an extraordinary pulse of life, is the want of words.
  23. Dull for the first hour and beefy with basic thrills for most of the second.
  24. You feel both moved and exhausted by the distance that Wilson has to travel, musically and emotionally, before reaching the shore. That makes it, I guess, a happy ending. But then, as one of the Beach Boys remarks, on listening to “Pet Sounds,” even the happy songs are sad.
  25. The allure of San Andreas rests entirely on the calibre of its pandemonium, savored, ideally, with a brawling audience on a Friday night. Indeed, it is the kind of movie that makes me want to campaign for the serving of alcohol in leading cinema chains — mandatory beer, I propose, with shots of Jim Beam to toast the dialogue.
  26. He stages the clashes of idiosyncratic characters that give the enterprise its life while observing the infinitesimal details of which that life is made—how to make new friends, how to hook up cable TV—as well as the ethereally intimate connections that result.
  27. The only performer who seems at ease is Luchini, eternally hangdog, who in one juicy moment spies Gemma and her beau-to-be, at a market stall, and confesses not to envy but to “a strange kind of jubilation” at seeing Flaubert’s narrative lock into place.
  28. Tomorrowland is a bright and pliable sci-fi thriller that stiffens into a sermon. Can’t it just be fun?
  29. Silver’s incisive direction blends patient discernment and expressive angularity; he develops his characters in deft and rapid strokes and builds tension with an almost imperceptible heightening of tone and darkening of mood.
  30. Wild and unrelenting, but also possessed of the outlandish poetry, laced with hints of humor, that rises to the surface when the world is all churned up.

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