New York Daily News' Scores

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For 6,911 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 42% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 55% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 8.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 57
Highest review score: 100 Fruitvale Station
Lowest review score: 0 The Fourth Kind
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,885 out of 6911
  2. Mixed: 2,801 out of 6911
  3. Negative: 1,225 out of 6911
6911 movie reviews
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  1. Beowulf & Grendel
    Credit Icelandic director Sturla Gunnarsson for having an ambitious vision: He took a look at the eighth-century epic poem "Beowulf" and decided he could cut it down to size. And he has, for better and worse.
  2. Alpha Dog
    Who would have thought that a real-life tale of sex, drugs and murder could be so instantly forgettable?
  3. Mister Lonely
    Not all of the movie works - in fact, huge portions don't - but there are enough striking moments to make a lasting impact. How ironic: In this fairy-tale of arrested development, Korine has created his most mature movie yet.
  4. Bandits
    This self-conscious movie by Katja von Garnier is shot like a music video, stocked with quick cuts, lip-synching and fantasy performances.
  5. When Brendan Met Trudy
    Trudy is really the only character with the "Barrytown" zest, and Montgomery throws herself into the role with unselfconscious abandon. She makes the screen crackle with energy.
  6. Ha-Hesder
    Despite its rare look at the tensions between religious and secular soldiers in a settlement on the occupied West Bank, it's a pretty static, by-the-book drama that would be insufferable without the sullen heat of Tinkerbell and Avni.
    • New York Daily News
  7. Chop Suey
    Caught with a shaky hand-held camera, this aimless diary glides indifferently along Weber's stellar collection of photos.
  8. Save the Last Dance
    It's about as routine a movie as they come, but it features plenty of endorphin-releasing hip-hop choreography as Derek teaches Sara to get jiggy with it.
  9. Ella Enchanted
    As an alternative to the slick, instantly forgettable fare usually made for kids and preteens, Ella Enchanted brings a little bit of magic to the multiplex.
  10. The Blind Side
    It's fair to say that Bullock's appealing portrait of a strong-willed Tennessee belle ranks among the best work of her career. It's just too bad the movie around her comes up short.
  11. Soul Surfer
    Dennis Quaid lends some needed saltiness as Hamilton's supportive dad.
  12. Mousehunt
    Aa bit too familiar an American tail. [19 December 1997, p. 82]
    • New York Daily News
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey
    It’s nice to watch the members marvel unendingly over their new find, while Pineda himself presents an ideal image of gratitude and hard work.
  14. The Book Thief
    The movie’s strong sense of empathy, enhanced by several noteworthy performances, ought to engage most viewers.
  15. Delicacy
    Gently sweet but unmemorable bonbon.
  16. Nancy Drew
    A very clever update of the 16-year-old heroine, managing to make her seem both as square as the Bobbsey Twins and as contemporary as MySpace.
  17. Knight of Cups
    It’s visually sumptuous but laborious. Worse, it’s pretty humorless. Knight of Cups takes itself very seriously.
  18. 30 Days of Night
    Lighter on horror than it is on inadvertent humor.
  19. Irrational Man
    Irrational Man plays, like so much of Woody Allen’s work over the past 20 years, like a bad Woody Allen parody.
  20. Shaolin
    Jackie Chan's cameo as a monastery cook is a tiny joy. To see Chan use his once-great physical skill on a hunk of bread dough is to see a giant work in miniature.
  21. Sex and the City
    The movie's beating heart is the friendship between the women, who had found some sort of happiness by the show's 2004 finale. Now they're all at a personal crossroads and need one another more than ever.
  22. Goal! The Dream Begins
    A sports movie for people who may not care about sports but can't resist a heart-tugging underdog story.
  23. The Basket
    You have no idea how determined director Rich Cowan is to suck the last drop of sap out of this tree.
  24. Mysteries of Egypt
    Everyone will be awed by the swooping shots and sweeping vistas -- the stuff IMAX really does know how to do right.
  25. The Art of the Steal
    Director Jonathan Sobol clearly understands the first rule of a good grift: misdirection. He packs his middling caper flick with so many known faces, it’s easy to miss all the other familiarities.
  26. Men at Lunch
    Best of all, we take a trip back to Depression-era New York and grasp its resonance more than 80 years later. Delicious.
  27. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
    You don't have to be a Muslim, or a humorless person of any persuasion, to find Brooks' performance excruciating.
  28. Being Flynn
    Weitz – who did a great job adapting Nick Hornby's "About a Boy" into an affecting 2002 movie – can't bring the pieces together here.
  29. Lucky Number Slevin
    Lucky Number Slevin would be too clever for its own good if it weren't so ... darn clever. This violent flick is not in the same league as "The Sting," which has my vote for the cleverest winding road toward a happy ending in screenwriting history, but it contains nearly as deft a con job as that 1973 film.
  30. Rounders
    Oughtta be much bettor.
    • New York Daily News
  31. Shooter
    If this were a more serious film, its cynicism about the U.S. government would put it in a league with "The Manchurian Candidate." But it is simply an Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick with bantamweight Wahlberg doing the heavy lifting for the preoccupied Governator.
  32. Robin Hood
    The problem with Russell Crowe's new take on the legend is that it has one muddy boot in history and the other in fantasy. The middling result is far from a bull's-eye.
  33. Leela
    So far beyond Bollywood, I think it's set in the suburbs of L.A.
  34. The Tigger Movie
    That there was no squirming among the kids at my screening may be the best recommendation of all.
  35. Group
    The sort of independent-film project that could have been disastrous in less-skilled hands. But Freeman's direction is so deft and the performances so natural that her remarkable experiment ends up feeling more realistic than most documentaries.
  36. The Fluffer
    What if you made a pornographic movie with a real story line and better acting but didn't show any sex? You'd get The Fluffer, a movie that sounds and feels like the real thing but isn't.
    • New York Daily News
  37. Flightplan
    The plot is contingent on everything going perfectly in ways no one can possibly predict, right down to the most outlandish happenstance of timing and human behavior.
  38. RocknRolla
    On the plus side, the actors - especially Butler and Wilkinson - work overtime to pump some extra life into the self-conscious script.
  39. In Too Deep
    A well-acted and surprisingly thoughtful treatment of the same old, same old.
  40. Imaginary Heroes
    In this story of suburban teenage angst, the parents are weird and often cliché to the point of incomprehension, as if seen through the prism of ... a 25-year-old.
  41. Multiplicity
    A finely performed, breezily directed, very funny comedy. [17 July 1996, p.33]
    • New York Daily News
  42. Broken
    There’s little doubt that the obvious parallels between this dark coming-of-age drama and “To Kill a Mockingbird” are deliberate. But while they are undeniably overreaching, director Rufus Norris has adapted Daniel Clay’s young adult novel with a sensitivity that will appeal to teens and adults alike.
  43. Keeping Mum
    A giddy black comedy about a homicidal housekeeper in rural England, is a hilarious reminder of that 1944 Frank Capra classic about two old maids whose cellar is cluttered with the bodies of would-be suitors.
  44. Piranha 3-D
    There are few real scares, though, and even fewer actual laughs. Despite several obvious gags, Aja never captures the spoofy fun of the 1978 original.
  45. John Dies at the End
    This is really the kind of movie that was made to be watched in a haze after midnight, at which point it would all, no doubt, make perfect sense.
  46. Sobreviviré
    Desperate for a slice of Spanish soap opera? You might try this misguided romantic melodrama.
  47. Lost and Delirious
    Sophisticated in that European way and predictable in that Hollywood way.
  48. De-Lovely
    There are terrific performances from Kline and Judd, some breathtaking staging and production design, and, of course, some of the best music and lyrics of the 20th century.
  49. Vanity Fair
    The movie crams in so many of the events and characters of Thack­eray's 900-page novel that the story often seems to be moving on fast-forward, pausing here and there to introduce a character, then skipping ahead — from London to the country to Brussels and on, eventually, to India.
  50. Ricky
    Imagine a quietly creepy "X-Men" prequel -- in French -- and you have this odd little parable.
  51. Downtown Express
    Grubin is an experienced documentarian, and he plays to his strengths here. He certainly makes the most of the Manhattan setting, whether his characters are practicing at Juilliard or playing for cash in the Times Square subway station.
  52. Palindromes
    This is extremely dark and politically loaded material.
  53. Let Fury Have the Hour
    The result is undoubtedly impassioned. But it's also so blinkered and self-congratulatory that it feels like an undergraduate thesis project. Even if you relate to the cause, you may find yourself frustrated by the effort.
  54. Hysteria
    While a delicate topic would seem to require a delicate touch, Wexler goes more for cheeky entertainment. To some degree, it works.
  55. We Are Marshall
    We Are Marshall is less a movie than a commemoration.
  56. The Phantom
    Based on the comic strip created in 1936 by Lee Falk, The Phantom is a handsomely produced, numbingly impersonal adventure film that fails to do anything new with the format. [7 June 1996, p.49]
    • New York Daily News
  57. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
    Kids, of course, are unlikely to get the religious allusions. All they'll see is a decent family adventure, perfectly suited to a cold Saturday morning -- and likely to be forgotten by Sunday.
  58. Penguins of Madagascar
    A sassy script and good-natured voice work from Benedict Cumberbatch and John Malkovich should keep kids and grownups entertained over the holidays.
  59. She's the One
    The comparison to Woody Allen is obvious, not only in the New York setting and the characters' comic approach-avoidance to sex, but in Burns' casting of his real girlfriend to play his screen girlfriend. Uh, Eddie big mistake there. [23 Aug 1996, p.41]
    • New York Daily News
  60. The Better Angels
    If you succumb to The Better Angels, the effect is like falling into a gorgeous photograph, but that also means the narrative in this arthouse film is oblique and sketchy.
  61. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    There are two types of superhero movies: the ones that brood and the ones that swing. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is proudly the latter, filled with high-energy action.
  62. Enemy at the Gates
    The sniper's life is a lonely one, full of shallow breathing and delayed gratification. Solitary as it is, Jude Law manages to get a little action in the bunkers of wartime Stalingrad in the ambitious but sometimes inadvertently silly Enemy at the Gates.
  63. Focus
    Only David Paymer -- and the actor formerly known as the singer Meat Loaf, playing Newman's suspicious neighbor, ring true.
  64. ABCD
    Madhur Jaffrey and Faran Tahir fare considerably better as Nina's conservative mother and brother, leaving us confused ourselves: Why didn't Patel focus on them, instead?
  65. New Suit
    Satire works when it's sharp and funny. When it's not, you get New Suit, an unremarkable sour-grapes comedy about the obsequious players and inconsequential products of Hollywood.
  66. Daydream Believer
    Eisenstadt does a nice job with limited resources (shot briskly on video, the film feels like a home movie), successfully capturing the futility of struggling actors.
  67. Late Bloomers
    Though Hurt and Rossellini make a warmly believable couple, they can't overcome the film's biggest drawback: Gavras' own awkward attitude toward aging.
  68. Private Romeo
    Unfortunately, "modern" additions (like the soldiers' YouTube videos and some social media moments) feel clunky, and a necessarily shortened approach trips the movie up, though leads Matt Doyle and Seth Numrich - accomplished Broadway actors - are intense, engaged and appropriately tragic.
  69. Rent
    As a conventional drama, Rent would be a pretty corny soap opera. As filmed theater, it's only slightly more con­vincing. The saving graces - and there are many - are Larson's original songs and the comfortable fit of its ensemble cast.
  70. Free Samples
    Weixler is a delight, and director Tom Gammill captures the right level of deadpan to pull this off.
  71. Free State of Jones
    The film gets predictable and loses its firm grip a third of the way in. Too bad, since the film directed and co-written by Gary Ross (“The Hunger Games,” “Seabiscuit”) gets off to a bang-up beginning.
  72. Mr. Popper's Penguins
    There is something infectious about the old-fashioned innocence of Mark Waters' comedy.
  73. I Trust You to Kill Me
    More vanity project than full-fledged film, Manu Boyer's modest chronicle is best left to diehard Kiefer Sutherland fans.
  74. A Good Woman
    I watched A Good Woman with a fixed smile frequently interrupted by giggles, but I didn't believe a second of it.
  75. The Killer Inside Me
    Affleck is playing someone split down the middle, but we're stuck seeing only one side of him.
  76. The Rocker
    Wilson works overtime to hold Peter Cattaneo's flimsy comedy together.
  77. Remember Me, My Love
    Laura Morante gives a fiery, layered performance as the frustrated matriarch struggling to keep her clan together.
  78. Bachelorette
    While plenty of gross-out comedies have come and gone in the last two decades, Leslye Headland's Bachelorette may be the most vulgar of them all.
  79. Muppets from Space
    Muppets From Space has its share of whimsical lines aimed over children's heads at their parents, but speaking for one parent whose kids are grown, it's not enough. [14 July 1999, p.36]
    • New York Daily News
    • 53 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Dog Eat Dog
    Movie fans might be better off watching a dog actually munch on another dog. Paul Schrader's latest action drama is downright awful.
  81. Gnomeo and Juliet
    This is perhaps for Shakespeare completists only.
  82. Wanderlust
    Despite the calculated advance press about the movie's nudity, polygamy, dirty talk, etc., David Wain's comedy is depressingly banal. And all that breathless hype now feels like nothing more than manipulation.
  83. The Pretty One
    This eerily unsettling indie takes a few pleasantly unexpected turns before winding up in a traditional place. But if you think it isn’t worth the time, you have another think coming.
  84. Khadak
    Even when their picture wanders from any reasonable path, it's never less than stunning to look at.
  85. Rid of Me
    Westby's nervy story is like "Desperately Seeking Susan" played straight. Let's hope O'Grady's next film meets this one's potential.
  86. The Book of Eli
    Yet it all comes down to one simplistic idea, and the result feels like a one-film evangelical movement.
  87. Australia
    With Australia, Luhrmann obviously intends to stage a grand romance against the epic backdrop of World War II. But what we get instead is an unwieldy mess that needed another six months in the editing room.
  88. Better Housekeeping
    Gives cinema vérité texture to a fictional story of trailer-trash dysfunction (minus the trailer).
  89. O
    This is a serious and well-acted drama, not a jokey ripoff, whose relevance (however distant) to Columbine is a plus.
  90. Wasabi
    Like a Hollywood buddy-cop movie gone through a multi-culti blender. It holds up a funhouse mirror to that familiar scenario in which a maverick cop breaks the rules.
  91. 40 Days and 40 Nights
    A curious entry in the current wave of raunchy youth comedies. It's refreshingly free of scatological humor, but even while aiming higher, it can't raise its focus above the belt.
    • New York Daily News
  92. Onmyoji: The Yin Yang Master
    It clearly wants to be more, but it's failed by its lightweight leads.
  93. A House on a Hill
    It's an interesting conceit that quickly becomes a precious annoyance especially since the drama itself is so static.
  94. Sacred Planet
    If Sacred Planet helps kids appreciate the beauty and wonder of nature and animal life, it will be worth it. But surely civilization can come up with a more generously entertaining delivery system.
  95. Jig
    Director Sue Bourne belabors the judges' final decision to such an excruciating length, it makes the whole movie feel a bit more cloddish than it should.
  96. Brooklyn Rules
    Michael Corrente's Brooklyn Rules takes him to the mean streets of Gotti country, circa 1985, and it's another gem.
  97. Fighting Tommy Riley
    The sort of slick-looking indie that plays well at film festivals, this heavy-handed boxing drama is really just a flyweight bulked up on cliches and false sentimentality.
  98. Girls Will Be Girls
    The leads are all pros, but thanks to the increasing onslaught of shock humor about abortions and rape, among other things, what starts out amusing eventually becomes something of a drag.
  99. Beauty Shop
    The story and humor are so tame the movie barely merits No More Tears.
  100. Earth to Echo
    Earth to Echo is a copy of a copy. The movie feels less like a weak “E.T.” than a substandard “Mac and Me.” And you may not even remember the latter, a 1988 flop — the fate likely to hit this well-meaning but underwhelming effort.
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