The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. The Hunter
    The Hunter never declares who is good or bad or right or wrong. And the implications of Martin's decision when the moment of truth finally arrives are left for the viewer to unravel.
  2. Damsels in Distress
    Even if it did not have other charms, this peculiar, uneven campus comedy would be worth seeing for the delightful felicity of its dialogue.
  3. American Reunion
    Remember "American Pie"? If you do, this movie is redundant and sad. If you don't, it's irrelevant.
  4. Tatsumi
    It's potent stuff, delving into pornography, incest, murder and mutilation in the company of alienated men and unhappy, sometimes cruel women.
  5. Scenes of a Crime
    This smart, cool-headed film, which has a "Rashomon"-like vision of the case, presents a disturbing picture of courtroom justice and how different people come to opposite conclusions, based on the same testimony.
  6. Womb
    If the 20-odd seconds of blank screen squatting pointlessly amid the opening credits aren't enough warning that you're in for some seriously sluggish storytelling, then the adoption of a snail as one of the central motifs should drive the point home.
  7. Artificial Paradises
    When a small drama sputters to life at the end, it's too late. You've already been lulled into dreamland.
  8. Love in the Buff
    There's charm aplenty in Pang Ho-Cheung's Love in the Buff, a romantic comedy that is as interesting for its glimpse into contemporary urban China as it is for the charisma of its leads.
  9. God Save My Shoes
    The film takes 70 minutes and a lot of silly chatter to conclude what every woman well knows: wearing hooker heels will have most men eating out of her hand. Or, if she's lucky, licking her aching feet.
  10. The Beat Hotel
    The arts documentarian Alan Govenar takes his turn at burnishing the legend with The Beat Hotel, a mild-mannered primer centered on the cheapo Paris boardinghouse.
  11. Turn Me On, Dammit!
    With its soft, bleached images and occasional detours into black-and-white stills, Turn Me On, set in an unspecified recent past, has a gentle oddness as unforced as its performances and as inoffensive as its dialogue.
  12. Wrath of the Titans
    At least it doesn't take itself too seriously. There are also soldiers, fireballs, smoke and sand. But not much to think about when the dust clears.
  13. Dark Tide
    Long before it ends Dark Tide capsizes and sinks with a sickening glug.
  14. Four Lovers
    Too lazy and too scared to say anything pertinent about love, society and the human condition, Four Lovers is content to be a pleasant, mildly titillating divertissement with no meaning at all.
  15. Goon
    Behind the film's brass knuckles are tender fingers. Why else would Goon use music from Puccini's "Turandot" to underscore critical dramatic moments?
  16. Intruders
    The monster that creeps into the satisfyingly shivery horror film Intruders doesn't just hide under the bed, it also lurks in dark corners, including those dimmed by your own imagination.
  17. The Island President
    The hope that infuses this movie makes it all the more upsetting to walk out of the theater and contemplate a looming disaster that the world's leaders seem unable to prevent.
  18. Mirror Mirror
    Consistently watchable, even when it drifts into dullness because Mr. Singh always gives you something to look at,
  19. Bully
    Bully forces you to confront not the cruelty of specific children - who have their own problems, and their good sides as well - but rather the extent to which that cruelty is embedded in our schools and therefore in our society as a whole.
  20. An Encounter with Simone Weil
    Though Weil remains fascinating, Ms. Haslett's film, even when it uses more traditional documentary techniques, mostly isn't.
  21. October Baby
    Not even a dewy heroine and a youth-friendly vibe can disguise the essential ugliness at its core: like the bloodied placards brandished by demonstrators outside women's health clinics, the film communicates in the language of guilt and fear.
  22. Musical Chairs
    This mawkish rom-com mines class, ethnic and ambulatory boundaries for cheap laughs and cheap-looking visuals.
  23. Come on Eileen
    Ms. Howe is frequently riveting: a scene in which she repeatedly, and with waxing abuse, drunk-calls her former husband (an excellent Keith Allen) may make more than a few viewers squirm in recognition.
  24. Losing Control
    There are rare flashes of successful humor, as when the film deals with the behavior of jerks and a flustered cabby, but these are not likely to be replicated in the lab. If you want to enjoy watching a confused scientist grappling with life choices, stick with "The Nutty Professor."
  25. All In: The Poker Movie
    The film, though, is so padded with cheerleading that it doesn't have time for a serious exploration of poker's place in the broader culture or the consequences of its rapid rise and global reach.
  26. The Trouble with Bliss
    Nobody in this sweet-natured, low-testosterone trifle is out for blood. Mr. Hall gives an agreeable portrayal of a man-child not unlike David Fisher, his character on "Six Feet Under."
  27. 4:44 Last Day on Earth
    Your last day - or, as it happens, the whole planet's last day - will be just like every other one. Mr. Ferrara makes this point with ingenuity and characteristic thrift by using found news footage to provide images of apocalypse.
  28. The Raid: Redemption
    The mousetrap setup and tight fight spaces, the bad blood and cruel deaths - soon makes the movie grindingly monotonous, a blur of thudding body blows.
  29. The Deep Blue Sea
    To put the matter perhaps more abstractly than such a sensual film deserves, it is about the fate of untameable, irrational desire in a world that does not seem to have a place for it.
  30. The Hunger Games
    Again and again Katniss rescues herself with resourcefulness, guts and true aim, a combination that makes her insistently watchable, despite Mr. Ross's soft touch and Ms. Lawrence's bland performance.
  31. Brake
    Brake is a full-scale paranoid nightmare with back-to-back double-whammy endings.
  32. Fake It So Real
    The taunts in the ring may be make-believe, but the slams against the mat are agonizingly genuine in Robert Greene's vivid documentary Fake It So Real.
  33. Pray for Japan
    If making a decent movie required only good intentions, then Pray for Japan would be off and running. As it is, though, this muddled collage of random impressions and personal histories, emerging from last year's destruction of the Tohoku coastline by the earthquake and tsunami, doesn't document a tragedy so much as repeat a mantra.
  34. Reuniting the Rubins
    It's the kind of stuff an amateur screenwriter reaches for when he has nothing original to say, because he's seen it work in other movies. It sure doesn't work here.
  35. Seeking Justice
    Mr. Donaldson has proven deftness with panting plots and knife-edge tension, but this cobbled-together noir does him no justice at all.
  36. The FP
    The film has an effective synthesizer score by George Holdcroft. It also offers some funny bits (a hokey prechampionship workout montage, a ridiculous gunfight), but not enough. And for such a film, its bargain-basement production values and lack of wit unexpectedly prove a greater liability than an asset.
  37. The Wise Kids
    In its unassuming way, this tiny, low-budget film is a universal reflection on issues of personal identity and choice for which there are no easy answers.
  38. Delicacy
    It's a lightweight romance that occasionally shows a sense of humor but seems afraid to turn it loose.
  39. Gerhard Richter - Painting
    Gerhard Richter may not fling paint at the canvas, Jackson Pollock-style, but as Corinna Belz shows in her documentary Gerhard Richter Painting, he can be his own kind of action painter.
  40. Natural Selection
    Aside from Ms. Harris's performance, the main reason to recommend Natural Selection - very conditionally - is that its creator clearly has talent. He simply lacked the resources to make the movie he envisioned.
  41. Free Men
    Hilali and Benghabrit were real people. Mr. Ferroukhi, who wrote the script with Alain-Michel Blanc, deftly interweaves their stories with the adventures of the fictional Younes, and so contributes a worthy and interesting chapter to the tradition of World War II dramas of conscience.
  42. The Kid with a Bike
    A quietly rapturous film about love and redemption.
  43. 21 Jump Street
    It wants to be fun and, to a perhaps surprising extent, it is. Largely forsaking the sweet multiculturalism of the original for white-dude bromance, and completely abandoning earnest teenagers-in-crisis melodrama in favor of crude, aggressive comedy, this 21 Jump Street is an example of how formula-driven entertainment can succeed.
  44. Casa de mi Padre
    A quick-sketch routine stretched - amusingly, absurdly, thinly - to feature length.
  45. Jeff Who Lives at Home
    The ending is also a test of the audience's openness to the kind of fantasy mocked, at the outset, by everyone in Jeff's life, including the filmmakers. They want to make us believe in something, though it's also possible that they are only fooling.
  46. Good for Nothing
    Good for Nothing may be slight, but it portends a promising frontier for Mr. Wallis.
  47. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
    Despite foodie-baiting close-ups of nigiri sushi brushed with soy sauce, and montages of skillful food prep, the film falls short as a satisfying exploration of craft. Like many other such portraits, it wastes valuable time declaring its subject's excellence that could be spent fleshing out demonstrations, explanations, context.
  48. Apart
    A brief appearance by Joey Lauren Adams adds a welcome warmth to the standard therapist role, but otherwise all is bewilderment and repetition.
  49. The Decoy Bride
    The script, by Sally Phillips and Neil Jaworski, mocks celebrity culture but never turns too caustic. The movie, like an island vacation, passes pleasantly and all too quickly.
  50. Friends with Kids
    The result is a talky, predictable, less-audacious-than-it-thinks romantic comedy.
  51. Silent House
    The film's most interesting aspects are its gimmicks rather than its frights.
  52. Sound of Noise
    What follows is a character study mixed with outlandish crime procedural. Everyone's quite serious about the joke, without a moment of Adam Sandler-style "look at how cute we are" that would only dilute the film's appeal. Sound of Noise is a dry treat - a solid, self-aware cult pleasure.
  53. Dissolution
    Filmed in high-definition black and white, Ms. Menkes's often exquisite compositions - a single, attenuated shot of the aftermath of a car crash is a miracle of choreography - drive a narrative mired in poverty and spiritual desperation.
  54. A Thousand Words
    The director, Brian Robbins, perhaps as a result of his prime-time pedigree, has so carefully engineered this manipulative machine that little emotional residue remains - only a product inoffensive, unsurprising and uninspiring.
  55. Attenberg
    The emotions are quiet, and the connections among the characters feel tentative and fragile. Though it makes no reference to the current economic and political crisis in Greece, Attenberg is suffused with a sense of malaise - of stasis, if you prefer a Greek word - that way well reflect the contemporary national mood.
  56. Shakespeare High
    Performing Shakespeare can save children's lives. That is the persuasive argument of Alex Rotaru's documentary Shakespeare High, an inspiring, if too short and overcrowded, examination of the competition among high schools at the 90th annual Drama Teachers Association of Southern California Shakespeare Festival.
  57. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    Highlighting the wacky while playing down the distasteful, Marie Losier's playful profile of the English musician and artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and his second wife, Lady Jaye, takes a lighthearted look at the things they did for love.
  58. Footnote
    It is a truism that academic arguments are so passionate because the stakes are so small. Footnote, a wonderful new film from the American-born Israeli director Joseph Cedar, at once affirms this conventional wisdom and calls it into question.
  59. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    Unlike those in the book, who speak through e-mails, diaries, letters and interviews, the characters here leave the impression of giving harmless nibbles instead of flesh wounds. Defanged and pushed into the background, the satire vanishes, and you are left with an agreeable romantic comedy.
  60. John Carter
    It is a potpourri of arcane and familiar genres. "Mash-up" doesn't begin to capture this hectic hybrid; it's more like a paintball fight. Messy and chaotic, in other words, but also colorful and kind of fun.
  61. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
    A disposable trifle of fleeting rewards that - like many a feature built around a "Saturday Night Live" sketch - shows its seams after three minutes.
  62. The Woods
    With a sturdy indie vibe and pacing that feels like "Portlandia" this film, a series of related sketches, maintains a laconic, deadpan tone that's a nice break from the usual high-volume comedy. But it simply offers endless variations on the same joke.
  63. Project X
    The Oscars are swell, but once in a while a film comes along that is so courageous it deserves consideration for the Nobel Prize. An entire generation has been born and gone to college since the Beastie Boys defined that most basic of civil liberties: You've got to fight for your right to party.
  64. Better Than Something: Jay Reatard
    The result is a frustratingly superficial look at a smart, driven and sometimes frightened young man who always felt as though he were "racing against time."
  65. Patriocracy
    Brian Malone's documentary Patriocracy feels as if it were made by someone who had been out of the country since the Clinton administration and upon re-entering was shocked at the polarized, dysfunctional state of the federal government.
  66. Where Are You Taking Me?
    Though it eventually includes landscape and wildlife, Where Are You Taking Me? is no survey of Uganda; it's too quiet, slow and personal for that. But the film is an unusual, visually rich visit to the nation.
  67. Last Days Here
    Nevertheless the fierce loyalty of Mr. Liebling's nearest and dearest is extremely touching, and Last Days Here - despite its stinginess with back story and early performance footage - works hard to reveal the man beneath the four-decade heroin habit.
  68. Let the Bullets Fly
    At least 30 minutes and several scams too long, the plot passes from amusing to confounding long before the final double-cross.
  69. Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?
    Heist feels rushed. Many of its points could use elaboration. Its final section is a to-do list delivered in the tone of a high school civics teacher.
  70. Boy
    This unpretentious comic tale of a youngster's growing relationship with a long-absent father has a surprising rhythmic genius: joy juxtaposed with humiliation, silliness with sadness, fantasy with reality, and none of it formulaic. The editing feels fresh, as does the film.
  71. The Snowtown Murders
    The Snowtown Murders reminds us that sometimes evil is immediately recognizable, but at other times it comes bearing bacon and beer.
  72. The Salt of Life
    Mr. Di Gregorio wrote the screenplay with Valerio Attanasio, and this movie is a richer variation of his small, exquisite 2010 film, "Mid-August Lunch."
  73. Black Butterflies
    In its jagged style and tone Black Butterflies is as close to an inside-out view of Jonker's tumultuous life as a movie could go without sinking into chaos. Its hues are continuously changing, and the seaside weather around Cape Town reflects her tempestuous emotional life.
  74. Tere Naal Love Ho Gaya
    Runs out of gas long before its on-the-lam stars.
  75. This Is Not a Film
    How did Mr. Panahi do this? I'm at a bit of a loss to explain, to tell you the truth, since my job is to review movies, and this, obviously, is something different: a masterpiece in a form that does not yet exist.
  76. Being Flynn
    There is honest feeling, genuine humanity and real intelligence in this movie, but there is also a sense of caution, of indecisiveness, that undermines its potential power. Being Flynn is an honorably ambivalent film, finally unsure of what to do with the two strong, complicated characters at its center.
  77. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    The movie is a noisy, useless piece of junk, reverse-engineered into something resembling popular art in accordance with the reigning imperatives of marketing and brand extension.
  78. Good Deeds
    Good Deeds honors goodness, which isn't at all a bad thing, and it's not without moments of genuine feeling. But by the film's end, after watching a seemingly infinite number of dour close-ups of sober self-evaluation, I felt bludgeoned by thesis-driven dialogue and noble intentions.
  79. Gone
    Seriously depleting the skanky-villain bin at central casting, the moronic thriller Gone stars Amanda Seyfried as Jill.
  80. How to Start a Revolution
    There is much more to be explored than this noble documentary, made on a tiny budget, has the resources to examine.
  81. Hipsters
    Who knows if anything remotely resembling the culture of Hipsters really existed? It's a musical, after all. In any case this movie, which won the 2009 Nika (the Russian Oscar) for best picture, is an endearing curiosity that, at 125 minutes, is as badly in need of a trim as the hair of its comically coiffed dandies.
  82. Act of Valor
    This archipelago of maneuvers, however jaw-dropping, never coheres into a real movie.
  83. Wanderlust
    For every few jokes that hit in this story about a recession-battered New York couple finding themselves on a Georgia commune, one sputters and dies.
  84. The Fairy
    An alternately effortless and forced French-language diversion.
  85. The Forgiveness of Blood
    Frustratingly, though, perhaps because he is an outsider and was concerned about appearing biased about another culture, about all that Mr. Marston does is chew on this clash, as if the repeated images of teenagers talking on cellphones next to a horse-drawn cart were a substitute for a strong filmmaking point of view.
  86. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
    The film, though, has some redeeming qualities, including the presence of Idris Elba as the obligatory good guy, who encourages Johnny to get Danny into the protective custody of a religious order.
  87. Putin's Kiss
    Political menace stalks youthful idealism in Putin's Kiss, a portentous, rather creepy documentary that masks its lack of historical context with an atmosphere of accumulating threat.
  88. Jess and Moss
    Mr. Jeter, who has made his feature-length debut with this film, tries to capture the loose feel of childhood's open-ended summers. But the vocabulary of his imagery feels worn out, and the ambience feels handed down.
  89. On the Ice
    Glinting white vistas and endless light blanket On the Ice, a frigid drama that's tough to warm up to.
  90. Undefeated
    While Undefeated travels well-tilled inspirational ground, it's also an irresistible story of football, faith and the lust for happily-ever-after black-and-white endings.
  91. This Means War
    Perfectly acceptable watched on the back of an airline seat or at home while you're doing housework.
  92. Thin Ice
    Thin Ice itself, while not entirely unpleasant, is gnawingly familiar, a slice of room-temperature heartland quirk that tries to blend low-key comedy with violence and mayhem.
  93. Cirkus Columbia
    Half of the time, the movie - based on a novel by Ivica Dikic, who collaborated with Mr. Tanovic on the screenplay - has the tone and pace of a farce. The other half, it plays like an unconvincing melodrama. The film assumes knowledge about the history and politics of the former Yugoslavia and the wars involved in its breakup that most Americans don't possess.
  94. The Secret World of Arrietty
    What the studio does, brilliantly, is preserve a hand-drawn look and feel in its work, as in the exteriors in The Secret World, where the characters pop against a painterly meadow.
  95. Bullhead
    Part character study, part crime thriller, Bullhead is the impressive but deeply flawed first feature written and directed by Michael R. Roskam.
  96. Michael
    This coldly compelling film doesn't try to explain Michael's behavior or analyze his disease. As if doing penance for Michael's sins, it eventually metes out unequivocal punishment, but it is small consolation.
  97. The Forgotten Space
    Unabashedly polemical and rigorously pessimistic, a sustained Marxian indictment of 21st-century capital. The narration, by Mr. Sekula, is at times lyrical and rarely subtle, but the film is most graceful and moving when its argument slows down or wanders into an interesting tangent.
  98. Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu
    The happy surprise of Ek Main aur Ekk Tu a Bollywood romcom that bears a vague resemblance to "What Happens in Vegas," is that it's not crude, sniggering or vindictive. Instead it's rather sweet and sometimes even a little unexpected.
  99. Hell and Back Again
    You can feel just how jarring and stressful it must be for a soldier to go from the life-and-death adrenaline rush of war to the maddeningly slow world of rehabilitation and forced inactivity.
  100. Bombay Beach
    Looks and feels like a fever dream about an alternate universe. Suffused with a sense of wonder, it hovers, dancing inside its own ethereal bubble.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »