The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Short Cuts
Lowest review score: 0 Gummo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. The Color Wheel
    A singularly unpleasant movie: full of obnoxious characters in scenes that seem overwritten and under-rehearsed, oblivious to the most basic standards of tonal consistency, narrative coherence or visual decorum. But it is also sly, daring, genuinely original and at times perversely brilliant.
  2. Polisse
    The messiness of the film seems appropriate to its subject, which is the attempt to bring at least a measure of order - and even a touch of grace - to a chaotic and frequently ugly reality.
  3. Battleship
    Has a plot as unambitious as a macaroni dinner, familiar and easy to eat and not particularly nutritious.
  4. What to Expect When You're Expecting
    The overall mood is of warm reassurance, and some of it is even pretty funny.
  5. Detachment
    The shriller its didacticism, the more unhinged it becomes. But even at its most ludicrous - when it is shouting into your ear - its sheer audacity grabs your attention.
  6. Elena
    Post-Soviet Russia in Andrei Zvyagintsev's somber, gripping film Elena is a moral vacuum where money rules, the haves are contemptuous of the have-nots, and class resentment simmers. The movie, which shuttles between the center of Moscow and its outskirts, is grim enough to suggest that even if you were rich, you wouldn't want to live there.
  7. The Dictator
    That potential is mostly squandered in The Dictator, which gestures halfheartedly toward topicality and, with equal lack of conviction, toward pure, anarchic silliness.
  8. You Are Here
    Moments of insight flare like fireflies and disappear, whether from underfinancing or overambition is unclear. Either way, this maddening mind game is likely to be more enthusiastically received in philosophy classrooms than in the multiplex.
  9. Small, Beautifully Moving Parts
    The best thing about Small, Beautifully Moving Parts is its admission that a positive pregnancy test is not always cause for giddy celebration; the worst thing is that, even at a lean 73 minutes, this flimsy road movie feels at least 43 minutes too long.
  10. The Observers
    Solitude is a character, so much so that, 25 minutes in, when the first human voice is heard, it feels like an intrusion. And when the weather warms enough for tourists to make the trek up to the observatory, they register not as a welcome relief from loneliness but as annoyances.
  11. Hick
    Ms. Portes's script strains credulity, and it's not helped by Mr. Martini, who can't find the right tone.
  12. Portrait of Wally
    The film's single-minded treatment puts property issues over other nuances of the affair, not least the art itself and the artist. A brief postscript about the early deaths of Schiele and his pregnant wife feels uncomfortably like an afterthought.
  13. Sleepless Night
    Hectic and harebrained, this galloping French thriller tosses a potpourri of plot points - crooked cops, sleazy gangsters, stolen drugs and an underage hostage - into a packed-to-the-gills nightclub, and stirs. Repeatedly.
  14. Nesting
    Aging Gen-Xers, it turns out, aren't all that witty, and Ms. Hillis and Mr. Grinnell don't have the kind of chemistry that might make this setup work.
  15. A Bag of Hammers
    Any film tossing comic interludes among its closing credits has to be convinced of their hilarity and of the good will the movie has earned with viewers by then. Perhaps the film's naked traffic in sentiment up to that point made Mr. Crano so bold. Whatever; his confidence was unwarranted.
  16. Patience (After Sebald)
    If he is a self-revealing writer, it is not in the usual, confessional sense, but rather because he seems so strongly present in his books, with a personality that is both the source and aftereffect of the prose.
  17. The Road
    The dead are unquiet and the living are terrified in The Road, a powerfully atmospheric blend of ghostly encounters, horrific situations and missing-persons mysteries from the Philippine director Yam Laranas.
  18. Where Do We Go Now?
    At heart, this jolly, galumphing crowd-pleaser, which won the audience award at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, is a raucous sitcom about scrappy little boys whose canny mamas conspire to keep them out of trouble.
  19. Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou)
    If Nobody Else but You is smart and entertaining, it is a little too clever for its own good.
  20. Bonsái
    There's nothing obscure about young love and loss, and a story, as Mr. Jiménez put it, about "youngsters who have to deal with this sudden lack of certainties which makes them more lonely than they could have ever imagined."
  21. Under African Skies
    The film skillfully interweaves several strands to tell a true story with a happy ending.
  22. Tonight You're Mine
    The look, the rhythm and the scruffy, on-the-fly ambience of the film make it feel unusually fresh and lively. It may be the same old song, but it's also a catchy remix.
  23. God Bless America
    Mr. Goldthwait's screenplay is essentially a comedy act fleshed out with a story he doesn't try to make convincing.
  24. Girl in Progress
    The movie, by virtue of its self-conscious parody of the kind of movie it is, turns out to be an unusually smart and sensitive example of the genre.
  25. I Wish
    I Wish tends toward the vaporous and not just because of its volcano; but whenever its children are on screen, lighted up with joy or dimmed by hard adult truths, the film burns bright.
  26. Dark Shadows
    Dark Shadows isn't among Mr. Burton's most richly realized works, but it's very enjoyable, visually sumptuous and, despite its lugubrious source material and a sporadic tremor of violence, surprisingly effervescent.
  27. Chronicling a Crisis
    Alternately tedious and illuminating, this deeply honest and scattered movie revels in its lack of purpose.
  28. Mother's Day
    Crisply shot and surprisingly well acted, Mother's Day suffers from an overly long script (a tornado hovers off screen to no apparent purpose) and annoying glitches in continuity.
  29. You Hurt My Feelings
    Unfolding in New England over four vibrantly represented seasons, "Feelings" is a small-scale wonder. Pivotal events play out in the spaces between scenes, leaving only emotional imprints that we interpret within a timeline that may not be entirely linear.
  30. The Perfect Family
    The dialogue in the film, directed by Anne Renton from a screenplay by Claire V. Riley and Paula Goldberg, has the loud, mechanical clicketyclack of a 40-year-old episode of "All in the Family."
  31. A Little Bit of Heaven
    A cringe-inducing romantic comedy turned cancer tragedy turned inspirational hosanna about living in the moment, embracing your bliss and other clichés.
  32. Last Call at the Oasis
    However frustrated they may be by political paralysis, corporate trickery or plain human stupidity, none of them seem inclined to give up. When they do, we really will be screwed, and we won't have or need movies like this to tell us so.
  33. First Position
    An appealing, largely upbeat documentary about young ballet dancers duking it out.
  34. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    This leisurely paced two-hour movie is a reasonably tasty banquet for the same Anglophiles who embrace "Downton Abbey."
  35. Jesus Henry Christ
    Whatever it intends, Jesus Henry Christ is not especially funny. There are witticisms galore in both the thematically recurrent imagery and the dialogue, but very few qualify as jokes, and any laughter is hard to come by. Willfully zany would be a more apt description.
  36. The Avengers
    The light, amusing bits cannot overcome the grinding, hectic emptiness, the bloated cynicism that is less a shortcoming of this particular film than a feature of the genre.
  37. The Giant Mechanical Man
    Pleasantly charming but instantly forgettable.
  38. Citizen Gangster
    A good-looking but passionless affair that remains stubbornly aloof from its audience.
  39. Restless City
    Mr. Dosunmu seems to have directed all his actors to pause before delivering lines, giving a languor to the film that comes to feel studied.
  40. 96 Minutes
    The talented Mr. Ross makes Dre's panic and adrenaline-fueled behavior all too believable. You watch as he sees his horizons dim. What could be sadder?
  41. Dolphin Boy
    More grounded in simple observation than in fanciful theories, this effortlessly engaging story of sudden tragedy and halting recovery wisely focuses on the facts and leaves the wonder to the audience.
  42. Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance
    Alas, dance films like Wim Wenders's innovative, kinetic "Pina" have now set a high barre, and by comparison the traditional talking-head style of this documentary seems primed for showings on public television.
  43. Headhunters
    As black comedy, the film is crude and downright sloppy when compared with the clockwork machinations of the Coen brothers' creations, as it has been since its premiere. Brown's panic is capably rendered, but his ordeals are not worth enduring to the bitter end.
  44. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale
    Despite the movie's considerable visual splendor, the pacing of Warriors of the Rainbow is clumsy, its battle scenes chaotic and its computer effects (especially of a fire that ravages the Seediq hunting forest) cheesy.
  45. Whores' Glory
    Quietly powerful but dispiriting documentary, which compares the world's oldest profession as practiced from place to place.
  46. Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story
    Mr. De Felitta's moody, well-rounded film is a kind of excavation and investigation of Mr. Wright's actions as a piece of civil rights history.
  47. Sound of My Voice
    A smart, effectively unsettling movie about the need to believe and the hard, cruel arts of persuasion.
  48. Elles
    In case you have forgotten, all women are prostitutes, and all men are johns.
  49. Bernie
    Gaudily vibrant, at times morbidly funny.
  50. The Raven
    The Raven tries to blend all of these motley genres together, and though the effort is valiant, the result is a mess. I suspect Poe's review of it would have been much more savage than mine.
  51. The Five-Year Engagement
    The Five-Year Engagement dutifully hits the marks of its genre, but it is also about the unpredictability of life and the everyday challenges of love. The sensitivity and honesty with which it addresses those matters is a pleasant surprise.
  52. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    The movie is a curiosity cabinet of visual pleasures but so breezy and lightly funny that you may not realize at first how good it is.
  53. Safe
    Now, if only someone would offer this actor a project worthy of the full range of his talent.
  54. Payback
    You can't help feeling that the movie owed its subject - and its audience - a bit more.
  55. Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment
    Inventing Our Life is a fascinating introduction to a movement scrambling to adjust enough to guarantee a future, without severing all ties to its principled past.
  56. Jean Gentil
    The filmmakers have no patience for details, either basic or telling. Their elliptical method starts to seem lazy, and Jean's plight, a journey from bad to bad, starts to seem a stacked deck. Through it all Mr. Genty holds your attention with his sober dignity. Too bad the filmmakers frequently let that slip into pathos.
  57. My Way
    The bloody chaos can be suitably overwhelming, but you're too aware of the whizzing camerawork, helter-skelter editing and bombastic score.
  58. Going Down in LA-LA Land
    Based on a novel by Andy Zeffer and directed by Casper Andreas, Going Down falls well short of compelling, either as a coming-of-age film, a satire or a romance.
  59. To the Arctic
    The threat of global warming to their habitat is spelled out simply in the narration, delivered by Meryl Streep. Otherwise, To the Arctic is a little dry.
  60. Think Like a Man
    Occasionally funny, though its dirty riffs - most provided by Kevin Hart as the Happily Divorced Guy - are as formulaic as its earnest parts.
  61. Chimpanzee
    To experience Chimpanzee, the latest piece of gorgeously shot pablum from Disneynature, is to endure an orgy of cuteness pasted over some of the most asinine narration ever to ruin a wildlife movie.
  62. Murder Capital of the World
    Heartbreaking stories of families who have lost loved ones alternate with the voices of experts from academia, law enforcement and politics who give their views on the causes of the crisis.
  63. Snow on Tha Bluff
    This riveting account of thug life - the unglamorous, impoverished variety - is punctuated by constant profanity and undecipherable slang, occasional violence, steady drinking and weed or crack smoking.
  64. Downtown Express
    Little more than a showcase for Mr. Quint - whose acting is almost as toneless as his playing is sublime - this trite, sunny drama pins lengthy musical interludes onto the flimsiest of narratives and hopes for the best.
  65. The Moth Diaries
    Roiling with jealousy, suicide and latent lesbian urges, The Moth Diaries dances on the border between hallucination and reality without fully committing to either. Yet the film's narrative frailties are offset by impeccable performances and a consistently eerie tone, helped along by a location as forbidding as the "Overlook."
  66. Fightville
    Spiked with energy and attitude, the nonfiction movie Fightville takes a fast look at a few men who, for pleasure and sometimes profit, like to smack and take down other men while practicing mixed martial arts.
  67. Darling Companion
    If you found "Benji the Hunted" unbearably intense or "Marley & Me" a bit too hard-edged, then Darling Companion may be the dog movie for you. On the other hand, if you like to watch cute pooches doing cute stuff on screen, you may be a little disappointed.
  68. The Day He Arrives
    The Day He Arrives has real force and its experimentation is in the service of a moving story about a man who, as he says at the start, has nowhere to go. And so he returns to a bar, a woman and situations that are always the same and yet always different - snow falls during one kiss but not another - playing a director whose life resembles a movie he keeps remaking.
  69. Marley
    Marley is a detailed, finely edited character study whose theme - Marley's bid to reconcile his divided racial legacy - defined his music and his life.
  70. Goodbye First Love
    Mr. Urzendowsky, with his dark curls, fine cheekbones and sad eyes, is a very credible first love, while Ms. Créton uncannily captures Camille's resolution as well as her almost willful vulnerability.
  71. The Lucky One
    If realism is what you're after, you'll do better at "The Three Stooges." The Lucky One is where you will find death, redemption and kisses in the rain.
  72. Oki's Movie
    Mr. Hong's casually brilliant feat of storytelling, akin to an ingeniously wrought suite of literary short fiction.
  73. Inside Hana's Suitcase
    It would be odd not to feel something about Hana and the Brady family, but Inside Hana's Suitcase feels more like a historical teaching aid than like a great movie.
  74. Kids of Today
    This bid to connect clubbing elders with their young counterparts, though, is undercut by a nostalgic insistence that the partying was a lot more fun, wild and meaningful back in the day.
  75. Last Will and Embezzlement
    The film has a bare-bones look that only intensifies its nearly painful sincerity.
  76. How to Grow a Band
    Ego struggles and innovator's laments (nobody gets us!) are a refrain in many band documentaries. How to Grow a Band adds a modest but effective entry to the genre's back catalog.
  77. Blue Like Jazz
    Through it all Mr. Allman, who played the skeevy Tommy on "True Blood," is a pleasant presence but blank. And Don's crisis of faith, which should be the movie's core and engine, is never really convincing. It's spelled out but dramatically inert, lost among the yuks of the Reed kookiness.
  78. Deadline
    Without Mr. Roberts and his grinning insouciance, this well-meaning mess would have no heartbeat at all.
  79. Life Happens
    Most appealing is Kate Bosworth, whose sharp humor as Deena has a bite that dares you to dismiss her. Even if you might dismiss her film.
  80. Detention
    Horror fans will probably grow impatient with the unevenly executed "Scream"-style self-awareness, and Mr. Kahn ultimately loses control of his referential plate-spinning, in what might be another illustration that catering to short attention spans leads only to mutually assured distraction.
  81. Unraveled
    Bolstered by animated re-enactments and Bob Richman's frosty cinematography, Unraveled is a mesmerizing one-man dive into narcissism, entitlement and unchecked greed.
  82. A Simple Life
    Ms. Hui, a rare successful female director in the Hong Kong film industry, drew her story from real events, and the movie retains a tonic flavor of the everyday: its drama unfolds simply, without explosive moments but not without emotion. She and her two excellent leads keep the film buoyant.
  83. Late Bloomers
    As more characters, including the couple's three children - enter the picture, Late Bloomers loses its narrative thread and becomes so choppy that you have the sense that it was butchered during the editing process. What remains is the skeleton of a story that leads to an abrupt, icky-cute ending.
  84. Hit So Hard
    Hit So Hard is the touching story of how and why Ms. Schemel ended up in her own private hell and how and why she made her way out again into the world of sunshine, sobriety and puppy dogs.
  85. Here
    Here, to its detriment, never builds its ideas into a cohesive vision. The screenplay by Mr. King and Dani Valent too often wanders off into poetic vagueness. But visually, Here, filmed by Lol Crowley, is still a stunner. Flawed as it is, I admire it immensely.
  86. Monsieur Lazhar
    Like no other film about middle school life that I can recall Monsieur Lazhar conveys the intensity and the fragility of these classroom bonds and the mutual trust they require.
  87. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    The film is well organized and visually snazzy and keeps enough distance from its subject that you don't feel swamped in a tide of hysterical fandom.
  88. Lockout
    Lockout, is as dopey an entertainment as imaginable, but it's also a reminder that the film's star, Guy Pearce, has always had great screen magnetism, to which he has now added a bedrock of muscle. Also: he can act.
  89. The Cabin in the Woods
    Novelty and genre traditionalism often fight to a draw. Too much overt cleverness has a way of spoiling dumb, reliable thrills. And despite the evident ingenuity and strenuous labor that went into it, The Cabin in the Woods does not quite work.
  90. The Three Stooges
    Peter and Bobby Farrelly's thoroughly enjoyable paean to Moe, Larry and Curly and the art of the eye poke.
  91. The Lady
    Paralyzes history and human drama with relentless hagiography.
  92. Post Mortem
    The sweep and energy of historical drama are notably missing from this grim, intense, mordantly comic little film.
  93. MIS Human Secret Weapon
    The execution is a bit clumsy, but the documentary MIS: Human Secret Weapon shines a light on an interesting bit of World War II history.
  94. We the Party
    Other Van Peebleses also populate the movie, and all are serviceable enough as actors; it would be nice to see them in less earnest, more original material.
  95. Player Hating: A Love Story
    A sad chronicle of absent fathers and messed-up mothers, drugs as currency and violence as the period at the end of every argument.
  96. The Assault
    In place of emotional stakes, we get gleaming, stylized, occasionally slow-motion violence, filmed in such extreme close-ups and cramped spaces that it's impossible to differentiate gunman and victim.
  97. We Have a Pope
    Mr. Moretti finds broad comedy in the antics of some clerics, who can seem as sweet as children, but in Melville there is pathos and there is tragedy, and not his alone.
  98. ATM
    Mr. Brooks capitalizes on antiseptic, fluorescent interiors, while the score, by David Buckley, nicely accents stress points.
  99. Keyhole
    To a die-hard Maddinite this may be a little disappointing, but for that reason Keyhole may also be a perfect gateway into the bizarre and fertile world of a unique film artist.
  100. Surviving Progress
    Like too many short documentaries, it can't do justice to its complex topic or finally to those of us watching. Because, while Surviving Progress puts forth a lot of general advice (stop the deforestation of the Amazon), it offers little in terms of real, practical, graspable solutions. People need hope; moviegoers do too.
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