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. 8 Mile
    Basinger gives one of her best performances as a woman too young, poor and overwhelmed to handle motherhood. And the uncommonly self-assured Murphy proves again that she is a cut above other actresses of her tender years.
  2. The Bread, My Sweet
    Cynics need not show up, but if you're looking for a feel-good fairy tale, this one's certainly sweet enough to satisfy.
  3. Hush!
    Though the director takes a thoughtful approach to the material, mixing humor and poignancy, he undercuts our sympathy considerably by dragging things out to an inexplicably indulgent degree.
  4. Far From Heaven
    May be the year's most derivative film, but it's also the most original.
  5. Femme Fatale
    Sexy, witty, energetic and gorgeous, but it is as stripped of the human element (in some of its production design, as well) as a minimalist Calvin Klein store.
  6. Treasure Planet
    After a moment's adjustment, it works amazingly well, because the emotions that drive teenagers like Jim to seek their places in the firmament transcend eras, fashion, even animation styles.
  7. The Santa Clause 2
    Won't replace anyone's annual viewing of "It's a Wonderful Life." But your family could find a worse way to take a holiday break.
  8. Santa vs. the Snowman
    Santa Claus and the Snowman stage a scaled-down "Star Wars"-type battle for the rights to Santa's sleigh on Christmas Eve in the pleasantly goofy, irreverent Santa vs. the Snowman.
  9. Love in the Time of Money
    Mattei's script was written in 1998, and the absence of any sense of the impact of 9/11 on New Yorkers is palpable. While watching "Love," I was thinking what great potential there was - still is - for a Manhattan "La Ronde" set in the days following 9/11, when strangers sought comfort from each other in spontaneous sexual alliances.
  10. Besotted
    A failed experiment in magical realism that makes you wonder where the magic went.
  11. Daughter from Danang
    The startling documentary Daughter From Danang cautions once again to be careful what you wish for.
  12. The Weight of Water
    The book has been altered in mostly reasonable ways to suit the needs of the screen, but what it loses in the translation is invaluable in comprehending what led someone to pick up an ax and wipe out two-thirds of an island's population.
  13. Tully
    The movie drags in some places and throbs in others, but it looks and feels like a bigger production than it actually is. The largely unknown cast is especially strong - this may be your first chance to discover them, but it won't be the last time you see them.
  14. I Spy
    Their (Murphy/Wilson) exchanges and interplay are so campy and over the top that I kept expecting them to pull out frying pans and start bopping each other over the head with them. I Spy is one just Stooge short of homage.
  15. Roger Dodger
    The result is a long night of confrontations that feel heavily rehearsed and unlikely. There are some good moments, but I didn't believe any of this.
  16. The Truth About Charlie
    The meltingly beautiful Newton gives a solid performance, but she and Wahlberg do not glide like Astaire and Rogers, to put it delicately.
  17. Frida
    Mostly, though, Hayek's problem is one of physical miscasting. She's so tiny next to the tall, rotund Molina that she looks like child in their scenes together. And despite a fake caterpillar brow, she's just not believable as a woman bemoaning her disfigurements.
  18. Jackass: The Movie
    This is the biggest lowdown, rotten, disgusting, depraved sideshow in the megaplex. Check your brains, your taste and your self-respect right over there with the bearded ticket taker.
  19. All or Nothing
    No picnic to watch -- Leigh's camera is unsentimental and unsparing.
  20. Derrida
    The sort of film one should probably see either a half-dozen times or not at all. It's a complex, highly ambitious documentary that aptly reflects its subject, contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
  21. Goyangileul butaghae
    Viewers of first-time director Jeong Jae-eun's sober dissection of dismal day-to-day rituals may want to throw themselves into the brackish water long before the movie is over.
  22. Le bossu
    It revives an innocently pleasurable genre - shades of Burt Lancaster and Errol Flynn - that combines lusty adventure, humor, the great outdoors and satisfying storytelling without having to concoct it in a special-effects lab.
  23. Abandon
    Has the integrity of good dialogue and enough of a writer's preserved craftiness to make it a worthwhile date-night attraction.
  24. The Grey Zone
    It's an intelligent, chilling movie, but one that can't quite shake those stage origins.
  25. Real Women Have Curves
    Any woman who wears more than a size 12 -- and that would be the majority of adult females in the United States -- will get buckets of self-esteem from Real Women Have Curves.
  26. Formula 51
    Only Emily Mortimer maintains a measure of dignity, playing the slinky assassin named Dakota. Whether her restraint was by her design or the filmmakers', she'll come to appreciate that she all but disappears amid the caterwauling and purging of a story that should have died in Liverpool.
  27. Naqoyqatsi
    Images wash over you like wind-blown rain, fierce and beautiful at the same time, largely shaped into themes by the haunting music of Philip Glass, who is here joined by cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
  28. The Ring
    I hated it, but I grant that it does tap into a vein of technological horror - the fear of the VCR! - that will have young videophiles chatting it up for weeks
  29. Auto Focus
    This movie is for select tastes. It's not the fusillade of porn that wears you down, but the melancholy of watching an unremarkable man glide down the tubes as if on a water slide.
  30. Fidel
    It's a shame Bravo doesn't allow herself a broader perspective, because she's right to consider Castro one of the most important figures of the 20th century.
  31. The Business of Fancydancing
    The movie eventually chokes on its own pretensions.
  32. Stealing the Fire
    Enlightening and rather unsettling documentary.
  33. Brown Sugar
    The vitality of the hip-hop scene serves as both backdrop and metaphor in a romantic comedy as sweet as its title.
  34. Below
    The story offers an interesting twist, but the only really spooky part is when a Benny Goodman record insists on playing without human aid. More scares, please.
  35. Ash Wednesday
    We wish other directors would keep Edward Burns busy acting so he wouldn't have time to make his own movies. This is his fourth since "The Brothers McMullen" and they get more tedious each time out.
  36. The Rules of Attraction
    Juices up the visuals with fancy camerawork and split screens, but it can't distract enough from the vulgarity of the material.
  37. Knockaround Guys
    Nothing you haven't already seen elsewhere, except for Vin Diesel looking even then like a box-office champ.
  38. Bowling for Columbine
    Moore brilliantly unmasks the inanity of the arguments used in the debate over gun control in America. He then undermines himself by leaping into the blame game without supporting his central thesis, that the media is what makes teens like the ones at Columbine turn around and shoot up their schools.
  39. The Transporter
    Kinetic, meaningless and fun.
  40. Safe Conduct
    A remarkable and moving account of a part of the French experience that needs more remembering and less forgetting.
  41. Tuck Everlasting
    Carefully walks the fine line between paying homage to a classic and entertaining a modern audience.
  42. Comedian
    Fascinating and often very funny behind-the-scenes look at the tedium and hard work that go into making strangers laugh.
  43. Pokémon 4: The Movie
    Little more than a blatant marketing tool. But it's breezy and brief enough to keep young fans - and even their parents - modestly entertained.
  44. Swept Away
    A shrill, amateurish two-character play that demeans women and leaves men with the quaint notion that the best way to a woman's heart is through enslavement.
  45. White Oleander
    What the movie cannot take from the book is its dreamily descriptive prose and interior monologue. Perhaps because of that, the movie changes the focus from Ingrid, the more fascinating creature, to Astrid, whose clay is more malleable for the big screen.
  46. Punch-Drunk Love
    Whether Adam Sandler can actually act is not actually answered in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love. But he's great in it.
  47. Family Fundamentals
    The film is somewhat hampered by the refusal of the parents in two of the three families to participate in it. Though the children provide an eloquent, impassioned presence, their parents' absence is overwhelming.
  48. How to Draw a Bunny
    A fascinating exploration of the mysteries of the artist's life.
  49. Welcome to Collinwood
    It takes us about half the film to adjust to its quirkiness, and we leave the theater with both laughter cramps and the feeling that it should have been funnier a lot longer.
  50. Heaven
    Too bad Heaven creeps into town when it deserved more fanfare. Consider it buried treasure, a thriller for the art- house crowd.
  51. Pipe Dream
    Stocked with an impressively high-quality collection of New York actors. Unfortunately, in asking them all to play such unlikable characters, Walsh flushes too much of that talent down the drain.
  52. Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie
    Young kids will be so distracted by the silly songs and clever contemporary references that they won't even realize they're sitting through cinematic Sunday school.
  53. Bloody Sunday
    Surges forward with barely a respite. It's like watching a propane factory burn, waiting for the tanks inside to explode, and when they do, we're right in the middle of it.
  54. Red Dragon
    I quibble over a film that has none of the artistic pretensions of "The Silence of the Lambs." This is more of a greatest-hits Hannibal movie, with a thunderingly portentous soundtrack, lots of mugging and autopsy detail, and a bang-up double ending.
  55. Just a Kiss
    Stevens, an actor taking charge from the other side of the camera, and writer and co-star Breen are going for a romantic black farce, a darkly noble idea, but one that requires far more empathetic characters and funnier situations than they've created.
  56. 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.
  57. Crazy as Hell
    Hell is sitting through a movie in which you have no respect for the protagonist and the "surprise" ending is as clearly lit as the exit sign.
  58. Skins
    Eyre offers a merciless, affecting portrait of reservation life, but his relevant themes eventually wash away in a sea of unnecessary sentimentality.
  59. The Man from Elysian Fields
    Craggy oldsters Mick Jagger and James Coburn steal the show from the young uns in The Man From Elysian Fields, a mostly entertaining twist on the Faust story about a writer who sells himself cheap.
  60. Shanghai Ghetto
    This is a vital history lesson that many of us have missed but few are likely to forget.
  61. The Tuxedo
    Jackie Chan finally has met his match, an opponent so deadly that none of his considerable talent or charm can fight it -- a bad movie
  62. Biggie and Tupac
    Broomfield conducts riveting interviews with a former LAPD officer, Biggie's fiercely protective mother and assorted hangers-on, but the actual thrust of his evidence seems almost irrelevant.
  63. Sweet Home Alabama
    Trying to resist Reese is like trying to resist Reese's Pieces: They're always the same but you can't help yourself.
  64. Moonlight Mile
    Jake Gyllenhaal is 21 and looks as though he's going on 16. This is not a problem for films like "Lovely & Amazing" and "The Good Girl"-- It is a problem in Moonlight Mile, where he plays a grown man recovering from the murder of his fiancée.
  65. The Trials of Henry Kissinger
    The Trials of Henry Kissinger serves as both a prosecution brief on the above charges and an unauthorized biography.
  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. Trapped
    Trapped does have a fine ensemble of actors and, except for what may be the most outrageously idiotic and improbable ending in a few years, is not that bad a movie.
  68. The Ignorant Fairies
    Though predictable and a bit of a soap opera, Ferzan Ozpetek's Italian drama is saved by the tremendous appeal of its stars, Margherita Buy and Stefano Accorsi.
  69. The Banger Sisters
    Forget the awful trailer that makes the movie look like chalk screeching on a blackboard. The Banger Sisters is sheer fun, and a great showcase for Hawn.
  70. The Four Feathers
    Ultimately, The Four Feathers is strong where its predecessors were weak (in the authenticity of combat) and weak where they were strong (in the larger-than-life quality of the characters). It's not a good exchange.
  71. Don't Ask Don't Tell
    This sci-fi spoof is desperately bidding for cult-classic status. It falls far short of that goal, but with so many jokes flying wildly around, it does hit its targets every once in a while.
  72. Secretary
    The daring, funny and quirkily erotic Secretary examines power exchanges between consenting adults in a way that other movies have not managed without turning off swaths of the squeamish.
  73. Invincible
    Herzog has certainly found a fascinating subject, but he does surprisingly little with it, especially considering the 135- minute running time.
  74. Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
    To pay for all the explosions and stunt work, the filmmakers must have decided to skimp on the screenplay. The rule of thumb is that one page of script equals one minute of movie, but there is so little dialogue in Ballistic that it could have been written on a matchbook.
  75. 8 Women
    The movie doesn't remind me so much of the movies of Minnelli or Sirk as it does a lavish parody of "Upstairs, Downstairs," with musical interludes (the divas sing, whether they can or not) that are often as painful to watch as they are audaciously performed.
  76. Spirited Away
    Turns everything we know about the contemporary world on its head, and substitutes it with one in which spirits, monsters, magicians and animals mix it up in a carnival of energy, good humor and freewheeling illusion.
  77. Snipes
    Oddly enough, given his limited role, the movie seems to have been made around Nelly; when he's not onscreen, everything falls apart.
  78. The Experiment
    Eventually any serious statement is lost in a sea of sadism, as he forces us to watch scene after scene of gruesome, humiliating torture.
  79. Elvira's Haunted Hills
    It's so cheerfully cheesy, you can't help but be amused.
  80. Alias Betty
    Of the several threads interwoven here, only one is riveting, thanks to the performance of Sandrine Kiberlain as Betty.
  81. Ted Bundy
    The Bundy portrayed here doesn't have even the veneer of charm; he's a raving psycho, and watching him work, whatever the filmmakers' intent, is revolting exploitation.
  82. The Children of the Century
    Inexplicable human bondage is a literary staple of film as well as literature, but Kurys ("Entre Nous"), usually so sure-handed with her actors, has trouble making this bond compelling.
  83. Igby Goes Down
    The movie is an actors' paradise, and absolutely no one disappoints.
  84. Barbershop
    Best of all, and worth the price of admission, is Cedric the Entertainer.
  85. Quitting
    An intriguing idea undermined by a lackluster follow-through.
  86. Stealing Harvard
    The question is, how did the producers get the amiable, talented Jason Lee to Boogie Board down the toilet with (Green)?
  87. The Pinochet Case
    The film is at its most compelling when the witnesses are telling their stories, and at its least in covering Pinochet's circuitous legal route to Britain's House of Lords.
  88. 7 Days in September
    There's nothing here for commercial reality-TV shows, just history caught on the run, offering a raw and timeless reminder of the day we had our eyes opened to the power of blind hatred.
  89. Heartbreak Hospital
    If you want to direct a movie that's already been done, it's a good idea to pick one you can improve on.
  90. City by the Sea
    The changes are meant to make it easier for audiences to accept Vincent's loyalty to Angelo and Joey, but they blunt the genetic mystery that made McAlary's story so compelling in the first place.
  91. In Praise of Love
    It's a diary, collage, meditation, elegy. But, unless you're going for a Ph.D. in code-breaking, it's also a bore.
  92. Swimfan
    Christensen is a bold actress with chilly frosting. For much of the movie, her character seems determined, sophisticated and bemused, rather than just plain nuts.
  93. The Execution of Wanda Jean
    Ultimately, the film is so determinedly evenhanded, it probably won't change anybody's mind. But no matter where you stand, it's likely to leave a lasting impression.
  94. Agnivarsha: The Fire and the Rain
    Even with the requisite melodrama, it's a rollicking, optimistic movie.
  95. FeardotCom
    The story is a mess, some of the images offensive, the acting under par and the dialogue silly.
  96. Mad Love
    The sexy, psycho Mad Love is like a Spanish "The Story of Adele H.," in which a woman loves once and only once, to the point of self-destruction, in the days before Prozac.
  97. Undisputed
    Offers nothing new to the long tradition of boxing films. But Hill's reverence for the classic form and the stone-cold performances of Rhames and Snipes propel the whole thing forward with a prefight buildup that's more fun -- and probably more honest -- than the awkward attempts at macho showmanship we get from real fighters these days.
  98. How I Killed My Father
    The acting is superb, with emotions roiling beneath rigid exteriors.
  99. The Isle
    Eerie, opaque and unblinkingly sadomasochistic.
  100. Little Secrets
    Treu and screenwriter Jessica Barondes may not have their ears to the ground that's trod by real kids, but as they did with their previous film, "Wish Upon a Star," they're allowed to dream.
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