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For 3,130 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 45% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 The Wolf of Wall Street
Lowest review score: 0 Event Horizon
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,748 out of 3130
  2. Mixed: 1,003 out of 3130
  3. Negative: 379 out of 3130
3130 movie reviews
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  1. Hide and Seek
    Through its first two-thirds, at least, Hide and Seek does a good enough job of piquing our curiosity that the movie's ultimate dumbness is more than a minor insult.
  2. Are We There Yet?
    I can't recall ever having seen a single bad Ice Cube performance, and his utter charm even in flimsy material like this only reaffirms his gifts.
  3. Head-On
    Vital and affecting romantic drama.
  4. Assault on Precinct 13
    Pulp needs a pulse -- without one, it's DOA. No matter how hard some of its actors work to resuscitate it, Assault on Precinct 13 is as lifeless as a corpse on a slab.
  5. Machuca
    Wood's film works, first and foremost, as a powerful character drama; it's not trying to teach historical or ideological lessons.
  6. Coach Carter
    Coach Carter, its flaws aside, is as interesting for what it doesn't do as for what it does.
  7. Elektra
    What's missing -- apart, of course, from a plot -- is any character development.
  8. White Noise
    Does feature one or two jump-out-of-your-skin moments.
  9. In Good Company
    Pleasurable.
  10. Meet the Fockers
    If there's any reason to bother with Meet the Fockers, it's to see Hoffman and Streisand.
  11. The Phantom of the Opera
    This film "Phantom" takes everything that's wrong with Broadway and puts it on the big screen in a gaudy splat.
  12. Hotel Rwanda
    A startlingly effective and upsetting political melodrama.
  13. The Aviator
    Hugely entertaining and extravagantly empathetic.
  14. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
    As it ticks by, laboriously, it leaves you feeling that you should be enjoying it more than you are.
  15. Spanglish
    The pacing is off, the emotional tone is wobbly, and none of the actors seem to be acting in the same style or the same movie.
  16. Beyond the Sea
    You can't BECOME a character if you want to BE that character: Desperation isn't the same thing as acting. Spacey's mimicry is so precise, it's exhausting.
  17. The Sea Inside
    There's a combination of fatalism and hard-edged humor at work in The Sea Inside that you can imagine Irish writers would feel right at home with.
  18. Million Dollar Baby
    A compendium of every cliché from every bad boxing melodrama ever made, Million Dollar Baby tries to transcend its cornball overfamiliarity with the qualities that have long characterized Eastwood's direction -- it's solemn, inflated and dull.
  19. Ocean's Twelve
    A light, smartly turned-out amusement, the sort of thing that's becoming more and more rare on the movie landscape these days.
  20. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
    Overburdened with knowingly charming touches. It's waterlogged with whimsy.
  21. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    Creates such memorable images out of squalid surroundings that I sometimes wondered whether I was being distracted from the devastating stories of these kids by the beautiful cinematography.
  22. Closer
    So bloodless that it feels like an act of arty dishonesty.
  23. A Very Long Engagement
    The holiday season's best movie so far.
  24. Alexander
    Never have a great historical hero's accomplishments seemed so inconsequential, or so damned hard to figure out.
  25. Christmas with the Kranks
    It's hard to discern exactly whom this holiday tripe is for.
  26. National Treasure
    Jon Voight shows up as Ben's daddy, and Harvey Keitel plays a devilishly goateed FBI agent: They're the only two actors who seem to have a sense of how ridiculous National Treasure is, but there's not enough of them to carry the picture.
  27. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
    The brilliance of The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie -- as well as the show -- is that it's cognizant without being self-consciously knowing.
  28. Finding Neverland
    It just doesn't have the buoyancy, or the resonance, that this kind of semifactual flight of fancy needs.
  29. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
    So clumsy and crass that it makes you doubt the pleasure of the first movie.
  30. Kinsey
    Condon's tone is gentle and lifeless and at times baffling: The picture is a weird cross between clinical and whimsical.
  31. The Polar Express
    Actually, the wonder The Polar Express induces feels something like a coma.
  32. Alfie
    The difference is that Michael Caine delivered the impossible; Jude Law can't.
  33. The Incredibles
    The Incredibles has that rare quality of feeling modern and classic at the same time.
  34. Ray
    What Ray does right, combined with its generosity of spirit, makes it the most satisfying American movie of the year.
  35. Birth
    A little like the '80s crowd-pleaser "Ghost," but way artier.
  36. Enduring Love
    If Enduring Love doesn't make sense as a thriller, it's equally nonsensical as the parable it wants to be.
  37. Sideways
    Alexander Payne's new movie, Sideways, makes you feel like you're trapped at dinner with a wiseass who's trying to convince you what a sensitive guy he is.
  38. The Machinist
    Bale gives a remarkable performance in a movie I can recommend to no one, because the sight of him is more distressing than any of the allegedly deep themes of the picture.
  39. Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die
    So bad it's almost like performance art, or those cheap records from the '60s, where the Chipmunks sing the Beatles' greatest hits.
  40. Sex Is Comedy
    Parillaud's performance is sharp on its surface and soft at its core. And if Jeanne truly is Breillat's alter ego, she is a pitiless self-portrait.
  41. Team America: World Police
    Team America, for all its outrageousness, is the first work from Parker and Stone that I'd describe as a failure of nerve.
  42. Shall We Dance
    The movie feels choppy and rhythmless. And he's (Chelsom) rather hopeless at dance sequences.
  43. Being Julia
    Like a truffle in a fluted paper cup, a small delight made with care and attention to detail.
  44. Vera Drake
    When one of the young women Vera attends to nearly dies of complications, the police arrest her -- and the movie goes thud, taking Staunton's performance along with it.
  45. Friday Night Lights
    There's some good acting in this mess.
  46. Stage Beauty
    An entertainment as billowy as a Shakespearean nurse's sail-shaped hat.
  47. Ladder 49
    Might have been an oversized Hollywood dazzler. Phoenix keeps it firmly and modestly on a human scale.
  48. I Heart Huckabees
    Feels weirdly impersonal; very little love, or even true thought, shows up on the screen.
  49. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    Crisp, informative documentary.
  50. Soldiers Pay
    Not among the most memorable works in this genre, but its deliberate lack of artifice and its stitched-together quality possess an undeniable power.
  51. Infernal Affairs
    One of the truest American gangster films of all time.
  52. The Forgotten
    Begins as a perfectly reasonable thriller and ends up rather an inane one.
  53. The Motorcycle Diaries
    There is a balancing act at work here that sometimes makes the film seem too careful, but I found it a lovely and supremely moving experience, a haunting symphony in a minor key if not a knock-your-socks-off masterpiece.
  54. Anatomy of Hell
    The surprise of Anatomy of Hell is that Siffredi's character is ultimately more vulnerable than the woman
  55. A Dirty Shame
    With big Hollywood movies getting glossier and more mechanical, and indie movies increasingly mistaking drabness for seriousness, we need Waters' sub-B-movie aesthetic more now than ever.
  56. Mr 3000
    A superb mainstream entertainment in the purest sense of the term: It's a picture made to please a wide audience without ever pandering to it.
  57. Wimbledon
    Slick, satisfying entertainment, as is the chemistry of Dunst and Bettany.
  58. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
    So captivating to look at that you can almost forget there's virtually nothing to it.
  59. Head in the Clouds
    It's fun, but it isn't believable for a minute.
  60. Silver City
    The satire doesn't go far enough.
  61. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
    Tsai Ming-Liang always makes you feel that there's a world of life beyond his movies -- a world populated by ghosts that are as real as we are.
  62. Incident at Loch Ness
    Something of a gigantic goof, perpetrated by Penn and Herzog -- and the goofees included much of the entertainment media, people in the film business, the Scottish authorities and (I think) even some of the film's cast.
  63. Cellular
    Basinger's debasement in the early part of the film is unpleasant to watch, and it's an unsettling bump in the context of the entertaining sheen of the rest of the picture. So much of Cellular is right on the button. If only it hadn't gotten its wires crossed.
  64. Reconstruction
    Reconstruction has a poetic sensibility, as well as an old-fashioned Continental appetite for romance, that makes it distinctive.
  65. When Will I Be Loved
    Toback has hit a new low. The candor and shrugging good humor Toback, at his best, used to show has been replaced by a repellent slurpiness: The whole picture seems coated with a slimy sheen of drool.
  66. Wicker Park
    Takes plenty of twists and turns, each so implausible and silly that you have no interest whatsoever in finding out what the next one will be. The director, Paul McGuigan, is fond of fancy split-screen effects and stylish, snappy cutting, but he can't tell a story to save his life.
  67. Vanity Fair
    There may be filmmakers whose own vision is vast enough to take on Thackeray's, but Mira Nair isn't one of them. Her new film of Vanity Fair is a disaster. Scene by scene and moment to moment, it's a woeful misreading of the book.
  68. The Brown Bunny
    In "Buffalo 66," Gallo was an unfunny prankster. In The Brown Bunny, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he's a real filmmaker.
  69. Hero
    One of the most ravishing spectacles the movies have given us.
  70. Suspect Zero
    Suspect Zero is loaded with cheap thrills for the expensively educated.
  71. Bright Young Things
    in its best moments, Bright Young Things is as lithe and as wicked as its source material. Depending on how much of a Waugh purist you are, its flaws may trouble you as you're watching it. But afterward, they might not matter so much.
  72. End of the Century
    While End of the Century feels a bit straggly toward the end (the rise of the Ramones is exhilarating; their slow, unfair demise is a downer), and its chronology is sometimes a little vague, the movie captures the spirit of both the band and the era they helped shape.
  73. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    May be very much about feelings, but it's made with a drab, juiceless, tasteful efficiency that distances us from the characters instead of drawing us closer to them.
  74. Collateral
    If you boil the psychology of Collateral down to its essence, what you get, mostly, is Vincent badgering Max for not having enough chutzpah -- in essence, for not being enough of a tough guy.
  75. Little Black Book
    The movie can't distinguish between what's likable and human and funny and what's simply repellent. In that respect, it's just as indiscriminate as the reality TV it shakes its finger at.
  76. Last Life in the Universe
    Much of the pleasure of the movie is the way its mood lingers with you afterward.
  77. Open Water
    Kentis and Lau succeed in doing what all filmmakers worth their salt strive to do: They make us care about their characters.
  78. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
    When you watch Greenwald's barrage of pirated Fox News footage -- his filmmaking techniques are clearly testing the outer limits of the "fair use" doctrine, and may yet land him in court -- it's an overwhelming experience well beyond the hoot-inducing moments.
  79. The Manchurian Candidate
    Toothless, gutless, one-note political movies like Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate, a picture that purports to have a galvanizing, liberal-minded theme (big business is taking over our country and our lives) but is really just ploddingly pedestrian.
  80. The Village
    The real mystery at the heart of M. Night Shyamalan's latest: How does he persuade actors like Sigourney Weaver and Adrien Brody to act in his supremely lame movies?
  81. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
    May have said more about race in America today than any other movie of last year.
  82. Intimate Strangers
    To borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, Intimate Strangers suggests bits of Alfred Hitchcock and bits of Woody Allen. But the wrong bits.
  83. Garden State
    Braff, and Garden State, give it the old college try, and at least some, if not all, of the sparks catch. Even if the movie doesn't quite take off, it doesn't leave you feeling stranded, either.
  84. She Hate Me
    The problem with She Hate Me is that there's no playfulness in Lee's provocations. He doesn't have the style or the naughty joie de vivre that you need to make a sex farce.
  85. The Bourne Supremacy
    As a piece of craft, and with the exception of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," it's miles beyond any studio film this summer.
  86. Catwoman
    The frustrating thing about Catwoman is that Berry does her damnedest to make the character work. Some of her physical moves are astonishing: Her offhanded grace is exceedingly catlike.
  87. A Home at the End of the World
    At the movie's end, nuance is all we have left; beyond the admirable efforts of some of the actors, the picture leaves behind nothing so human as a fingerprint.
  88. I, Robot
    I, Robot strives to be so many things that it ultimately falls away to nothing, a heap of expensive metal parts.
  89. The Door in the Floor
    It's nearly impossible to tell whether Williams thought he was making a family tragedy or a sex farce.
  90. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
    It has a pleasing, noodly elasticity about it -- the picture knows what its limits are and proceeds to boogie unself-consciously far outside them.
  91. Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
    Veers unpredictably between wrenching psychodrama and "Spinal Tap"-style mockumentary.
  92. King Arthur
    It's hard to care about a valiant groping for accuracy when a story is so badly told you can't tell what the devil is going on.
  93. Before Sunset
    Although there isn't a single kiss in this love story, it's intensely erotic -- and more to the point, it's not afraid of eroticsm's juicier and more forthright twin, carnality.
  94. The Clearing
    Just when you think The Clearing is too simplistic to have any dramatic edge, the actors dig in and flesh out the stark framework of the story.
  95. Spider-Man 2
    For a big-budget action movie Spider-Man 2 is modest and not assaultive -- it has a boring decency.
  96. The Notebook
    The movie not only approaches a level of shamelessness you have to see to disbelieve, it does it in a manner that's both inept and crass.
  97. Two Brothers
    Unless you're a lover of tigers, there's probably no reason to see Jean-Jacques Annaud's Two Brothers. And maybe not even then.
  98. Fahrenheit 9/11
    Fahrenheit 9/11 is more like a drug experience than a political documentary. It's a mind-bending, half-digested mass of video clips, interviews, statistics, rampant speculation and the cheap gags Moore has never been able to resist.
  99. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
    Strangely exhilarating.
  100. The Terminal
    Probably the worst-directed film Spielberg has ever made. A peculiarly rhythmless piece of work, it seems to go on forever, though nearly every one of the scenes is cut off before it has been dramatically developed.
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