The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 20,311 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: 9,399 out of 20311
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20311
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20311
20311 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Kaboom
    Chaotic, trifling, oddly likable film.
  2. Hanna
    In the end there might not be much to this tale other than titillation, but there's plenty to be said for Ms. Ronan, who was the best thing about "Atonement" and holds her ground against forceful screen presences like Ms. Blanchett and Mr. Bana.
  3. Madea's Big Happy Family
    This time the suds outweigh the humor, and to its credit Mr. Perry's script doesn't duck tragic consequences.
  4. Vanishing on 7th Street
    The story, which starts promisingly only to stop, restart, sputter and come to a wheezing, disappointing puff of nada, proves the least satisfying part of the whole. The finale certainly isn't earned, but all the nasty, tiny jolts throughout the movie do prick the skin nicely.
  5. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    Despite the slow start Mr. Condon closes the series in fine, smooth style. He gives fans all the lovely flowers, conditioned hair and lightly erotic, dreamy kisses they deserve.
  6. The Help
    Save for Ms. Davis's, however, the performances are almost all overly broad, sometimes excruciatingly so, characterized by loud laughs, bugging eyes and pumping limbs.
  7. Super 8
    Like his (Abrams) previous features, "Mission: Impossible III" and "Star Trek," Super 8 is an enticing package without much inside.
  8. The Amazing Spider-Man
    Mr. Webb's Spider-Man movie works only because he keeps the whole package, at least until the requisite final blowout, tethered to his two appealing leads.
  9. 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.
  10. Mr. Popper's Penguins
    There is nothing new here, but Mr. Waters, as he showed with the smarter and more daring "Mean Girls" and "Freaky Friday," knows how to keep things buzzing along.
  11. Bad Teacher
    Ms. Diaz has found her down-and-dirty element in the kind of broad comedy that threatens to get ugly and more or less succeeds on that threat.
  12. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    Nothing you see makes any sense at all, but the sensations are undeniable, and kind of fun in their vertiginous, supercaffeinated way.
  13. The Grace Card
    Responses to religious films are bound to be personal, so at the risk of sounding patronizing, I'll say that my main reaction to The Grace Card was one of pleasant surprise at its competence.
  14. Arthur Christmas
    The plot may be a little too cluttered for the toddler crowd to follow, but the next age group up should be amused, and the script by Peter Baynham and Sarah Smith has plenty of sly jokes for grown-ups.
  15. The Rum Diary
    A mild lark disguised as a wild bender, The Rum Diary is also a touching tribute to Thompson himself.
  16. We Bought a Zoo
    Whatever the case, you may not buy his happy endings, but it's a seductive ideal when all of God's creatures, great and small, buxom and blond, exist in such harmony.
  17. In Time
    The tick tick tock of the mortal clock gives the science-fiction thriller In Time its slick, sweet premise.
  18. 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?
  19. Port of Memory
    The movie too often fails to reward the close watching it requires. While its stillness powerfully suggests stasis, its fragmentary approach doesn't achieve a cumulative power.
  20. The Sky Turns
    The overall effect is one of lulling beauty and immersion in the landscape and culture - certainly enough to carry you through the film - but also an irritating sensation of being led by the nose through Ms. Álvarez's highly aestheticized ruminations.
  21. The Imperialists Are Still Alive!
    If The Imperialists Are Still Alive! doesn't go much of anywhere despite its peripatetic characters, that stasis seems intentional.
  22. Cracks
    In many ways Cracks is lurid and rickety. But its gripping ensemble performances lend it an emotional intensity that outweighs its shortcomings.
  23. Skateland
    Though leaning too heavily on period tunes and the templates of Mr. Linklater and John Hughes (to whom the film is dedicated), Mr. Burns has a distinctly spacious style that gives female characters room to breathe.
  24. Super
    Super rides on the carefully bent performances of its stars.
  25. Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer
    The whole film is a celebration of messy, colorful, vigorous creativity, echoed in Cynthia Charette's gloriously cluttered hodgepodge production design, with barely a product placement in sight.
  26. Johnny English Reborn
    As the movie glides along, it may not elicit explosive laughter, but it plants a steady smile on your face and doesn't leave you feeling molested. If that's another way of saying Johnny English Reborn is old-fashioned, so be it.
  27. 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.
  28. 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.
  29. Last Night
    Nominally a story about sex, lies and faithfulness, Last Night is more truly a cautionary tale about mousetrap narratives.
  30. Everything Strange and New
    This intriguing, sometimes frustrating, in some ways amateurish movie is a work of vaulting artistic ambition.
  31. Lemmy
    Diverting if hagiographic documentary with an unprintable subtitle.
  32. Contraband
    The absurdity of the story in the largely thrill-free thriller Contraband, its hairpin twists and outrageous coincidences, may keep even hungry action fans away. That's too bad because the story doesn't matter. (It rarely does.)
  33. The Bourne Legacy
    By the time Rachel Weisz, as a scientist called Dr. Marta Shearing, showed up in a lab coat, I stopped trying to parse every plot twist and just went with the action flow.
  34. Korkoro
    Korkoro (the word means freedom in Romani) has an unexpectedly leisurely quality as it shows the texture of Gypsy life - the music-making, the intense bonds with horses and the natural world - and its awkward fit with modernity.
  35. American: The Bill Hicks Story
    An oddly sterile documentary inspired by a particularly fecund imagination, American: The Bill Hicks Story recounts a bright-burning life while leaving us mostly in the dark.
  36. Monsters University
    While it’s a visual enchantment (there’s a knockout compendium of horror film clichés), its reversion to a largely male domain after “Brave,” its first and only female-driven story, is a drag.
  37. 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.
  38. Ice Age: Continental Drift
    Continental Drift, like its predecessors, is much too friendly to dislike, and its vision of interspecies multiculturalism is generous and appealing.
  39. Wretches & Jabberers
    The film is maddeningly vague about how the two men made their initial breakthroughs, but it certainly is proof that even those who are written off as children can find a voice.
  40. The Croods
    The movie is at its most interesting and amusing when riffing on how cavemen might have reacted to new experiences and ideas, like fire and shoes. Whether the kiddies will appreciate that is unclear, but they’ll certainly like the voice work done by Emma Stone as Eep.
  41. Exporting Raymond
    It has the structure and some of the pleasures of a well-made sitcom or docu-reality show, despite the nervous-looking, unhappy guy at its center; it could have been called "Nobody Understands Phil."
  42. The Devil's Double
    As the film moves through his world of blood and sex and curdled machismo, The Devil's Double inhales some of his toxic, shallow energy. At times you feel as if you were stuck in "Grand Theft Auto: Baghdad City," which, while entertaining enough, can also become a bit wearying.
  43. A Little Help
    Though the enjoyable prickliness of the film's early scenes soon dissolves into cozy solutions, a sturdy supporting cast - even Ron Leibman's scenery-chewing turn as Laura's blowhard father is more amusing than annoying - balances the scales.
  44. Just Like Us
    A laudable if lightweight argument for broader minds and thicker skins.
  45. Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
    If Conan O'Brien Can't Stop is consistently watchable, it isn't especially funny, nor does it give any deeper insight into its star than you might get from seeing his late-night shows.
  46. Another Earth
    A coming-of-adulthood story that improbably blends a plaintive drama with romantic longing and far-out science fiction.
  47. What on Earth?
    It's the film's geometrists who enthrall most, revealing that many of the shapes - one of which famously made the cover of a 1990 Led Zeppelin album - hold entirely new answers to Euclidean problems.
  48. That's What I Am
    Mr. Harris's depiction of a saintly, soft-spoken, bow-tie-wearing middle-school teacher lends the movie a moral weight it probably couldn't have summoned had another actor played the role.
  49. The Robber
    The Robber may have less on its mind than its sheen of seriousness would suggest, but the view is gorgeous.
  50. True Legend
    After a stirring opening battle, however, the fights in True Legend become pretty routine. And beyond some lovely mountain scenery and a tiny cameo by a radiant Michelle Yeoh, there isn't much else to look at.
  51. Louder Than a Bomb
    The efforts to document the teams' creative processes aren't particularly successful - no camera can capture something that elusive - but the filmmakers do a fine job with the back stories of the featured poets.
  52. The Whistleblower
    For all its high-mindedness, The Whistleblower has a choppy, fumbling screenplay (by Ms. Kondracki and Eilis Kirwan) that lurches between shrill editorializing and vagueness while sorting through more characters than it can comfortably handle or even readily identify.
  53. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    It's all very sweet and lightly comedic. After it's over, you half expect a statement to appear on the screen promising, "No humans were traumatized during the making of this film."
  54. Janie Jones
    It feels mostly authentic until a contrived ending that leaves a saccharine taste.
  55. Vito Bonafacci
    Effectively a tutorial on some basic Catholic rituals, this isn't a great film - too many scenes are static or clumsily acted - but it is elevated by the touches of neorealist style in its small-bore focus and its soundtrack of classical compositions and Italian music from the 12th and 13th centuries.
  56. The Colors of the Mountain
    Mr. Arbeláez cites Iranian film as an influence, and it's evident in his movie's subdued lyricism and its focus on the boys, whose games and projects - they keep trying to rescue the ball - are treated with a sweetness that steers clear (mostly) of sentimentality.
  57. The People vs. George Lucas
    Frenetic, paper-thin but entertaining documentary.
  58. Poltergeist
    All in all there’s not much to complain about here, except that — as with a lot of revisited classics — the story’s not as revolutionary as you remember it. For veterans of the 1982 Poltergeist, it’s more like scary but pleasant nostalgia.
  59. What to Expect When You're Expecting
    The overall mood is of warm reassurance, and some of it is even pretty funny.
  60. Life 2.0
    Whether you're predisposed to seeing Second Life as liberating or creepy, Life 2.0 would have been more interesting and original if it, like its subjects, had dwelled more in the virtual world, and if it had told us more about that world's mechanics and folkways.
  61. Empire of Silver
    This weirdly engaging tale of banking and bad behavior makes 19th-century China look uncomfortably like 21st-century America.
  62. United Red Army
    The stilted and awkward physical and vocal performances in combination with the visually flat cinematography bring to mind the look, sound and visual texture of American daytime soaps, an association that perversely makes the movie more and more watchable.
  63. Mr. Nice
    An affable throwback to those guilt-free days when hippie drug dealers radiated the glamorous aura of avant-garde heroes risking prison to spread the doctrine of liberation through cannabis.
  64. One Lucky Elephant
    Animal people sometimes say the wackiest things, but here, alas, they never satisfyingly address the ethical questions of what it means to capture and keep wild animals. Happily, while this movie's head may not always be in the right place, its heart is.
  65. Hotel Transylvania
    For the first half of the film, amusing monster humor keeps things interesting; some monsters, it turns out, are better at party games than others.
  66. An American Werewolf in London
    When the movie backfires, which it finally does, it's because too much grisly footage has been used too lightly. Mr. Landis's comic detachment, which has been fascinating throughout much of the movie, is something he holds on to even when a deeper response is needed. Eventually it becomes less comic than callow.
  67. Film Socialisme
    In typical Godardian fashion the film manages to be both strident and elusive, argumentative and opaque.
  68. Turkey Bowl
    A quirky offering by Kyle Smith that does nothing more or less than show a touch-football game among friends. "It's sort of interesting," you might find yourself saying, "but is it a film?"
  69. Hunter Killer
    However nutty its geopolitics, Hunter Killer does its job as popcorn thriller with brisk efficiency.
  70. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    There are, once again, too many busy, uninterestingly staged battles that lean heavily on obvious, sometimes distracting digital sorcery. But there are also pacific, brooding interludes in which the actors — notably Mr. Freeman, an intensely appealing screen presence — remind you that there’s more to Middle-earth than clamor and struggle.
  71. Man of Steel
    At once frantically overblown and beautifully filigreed, Man of Steel will turn on everyone it doesn’t turn off.
  72. Leap Year
    Making sadomasochism appear less erotic than stamp collecting, Leap Year is a slow flare of emotional agony.
  73. Halloween
    This isn’t a wisecracking, tongue-in-cheek picture: Green wants us to believe in his Bogeyman, and Curtis is his ace card. Leaving no room for winks or giggles, she makes Laurie’s long-festering terror the glue that holds the movie together.
  74. Polytechnique
    It is neither floridly melodramatic nor showily minimalist. The virtue - and also the limitation - of this movie is that it confronts senselessness and insists on remaining calm and sane.
  75. Singham
    More and more, Bollywood movies are urban tales for urban audiences. What feels most backward-glancing about Singham is its uncomplicated, even cartoonish insistence on the benefits of village soil over city dirt for cultivating bedrock Indian values.
  76. Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish
    Sprawling and sometimes confusing, but its premise is charming and not at all far-fetched.
  77. Saving Private Perez
    If you don't get the jokes, there isn't a whole lot else to get, and it's a safe assumption that non-Latino, non-Spanish-speaking viewers are going to miss a lot of them.
  78. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
    The camera movements are graceful, almost ethereal, yet the objects themselves - with their impastos of organic and inorganic materials, their metaphoric resonances, historical allusions and intimations of war - feel unmistakably weighty.
  79. A Proper Violence
    That it eventually - if barely - succeeds is due more to the resilience of its actors than to the discipline of its makers.
  80. Little Girl (La Pivellina)
    Though at times too determined to avoid dramatic highs and lows, Little Girl strikes gold in the casting of the 2-year-old Asia Crippa.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jane's Journey
    Skimps on intellectual substance but skirts by on the lightly likable charm of its subject.
  82. The Woman on the 6th Floor
    Lighter than a meringue and as insubstantial, the French boulevard comedy The Women on the 6th Floor was designed for the gentle laughter it easily earns.
  83. Shame
    How can visual pleasure communicate existential misery? It is a real and interesting challenge, and if Shame falls short of meeting it, the seriousness of its effort is hard to deny.
  84. White Wash
    Has a complicated story to tell, about black surfers and, more broadly, about African-American history and the history of surfing. Great topics all, but that's a lot of ground to cover and, unsurprisingly, the film often feels a bit scattershot.
  85. There Was Once...
    Ah, well. "There Was Once ...may feel like sober, do-gooder public television, but it has integrity, recording one specific town's slice of living history. Simple as that, it's a worthy document.
  86. Journey from Zanskar
    At times you wish Mr. Marx had sharper storytelling skills (or a better editor). Some important details seem clear only in retrospect, and some remain murky. Still, Mr. Marx shines a light on a place and a way of life that are rapidly changing.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Catechism Cataclysm
    A lot of the fun in The Catechism Cataclysm, a horror-comic head trip from the writer-director Todd Rohal ("The Guatemalan Handshake"), comes in the form of silly, strange line deliveries: nonsense songs in strained falsetto, crisply over-articulated cuss words, syllables distended into schoolyard taunts.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Sons of Tennessee Williams
    As the film cuts back and forth between the present day and a historical survey of gay culture, its tone wavers between dutifully somber and irrepressibly funny.
  89. Oka!
    If only for its portrait of a land and a fascinating culture, Oka! is worth the journey.
  90. 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.
  91. RA. One
    If the storytelling disappoints (shocking!), the film mostly doesn't. It relies on action and effects and Bollywood's trump card, star power, to carry the day. This is Mr. Khan's movie, and once he sheds Shekhar's droopy locks, he shines as the deadpan, action-hero robot with digital snot and smooth moves on the dance floor.
  92. Oranges and Sunshine
    Rona Munro's screenplay for Oranges and Sunshine is unnecessarily flighty. As the story ricochets between Britain and Australia, the film often loses track of time and becomes fragmented as it struggles to integrate too many subplots. What holds it together is Ms. Watson's calm, sturdy performance.
  93. You All Are Captains
    I can't say I enjoyed it, but I acknowledge that You All Are Captains has something to express that can't be said except the way it's said, and that way there be art.
  94. Cargo
    The film leans almost exclusively on the focused performances of its two leads, who create a credibly barbed chemistry that goes a long way toward distracting us from the film's low-budget deficiencies.
  95. Watching TV with the Red Chinese
    The film nicely captures the grad-student vibe: beer-fueled bull sessions about science, religion, probability and destiny; fragile, self-absorbed egos preening even as confidence wavers.
  96. The Innkeepers
    Luke and Claire are guilty, above all, of being dumb and bored. Even their interest in the ghost that may dwell in the dark corners of the Pedlar seems tepid and lacking in conviction. The movie, clever and rigorous though it is, feels that way too.
  97. Answers to Nothing
    Some fine performances and an embrace of understatement make Matthew Leutwyler's oddly titled Answers to Nothing a respectable entry in the multiple-stories-that-interlock genre.
  98. Knuckle
    While it's frustrating that Mr. Palmer doesn't dig deep into the complexities of the fights, one of the movie's strengths is the honesty with which he confesses his doubts about them.
  99. Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl
    Ladies vs Ricky Bahl has much to recommend it at first, not least its premise.
  100. Perfect Sense
    The love story doesn't quite work. Mr. McGregor and Ms. Green make an attractive couple. But the movie's notion of two self-centered people ill suited to each other, shedding their defenses and clinging together, feels forced and sentimental.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »