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. 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.
  2. Outside the Law
    As powerful and well made as it is, Outside the Law is too schematic and single-minded to lodge itself in your mind as a fully realized cinematic epic. Its few female characters are sketchy at best. It is all politics, all the time.
  3. Nights and Weekends
    The problem with the movie is that James and Mattie exhibit little but shallow, infantile neurosis, with next to no hint of a complex -- or even legible -- inner life.
  4. Better Than Chocolate
    For all the real problems faced by its characters, Better Than Chocolate is finally a comic rhapsody to romantic love, the possibility of happily ever after within an all-accepting subculture.
  5. Advantageous
    It’s a kick to see how effectively Ms. Phang has created the future on a shoestring even if she hasn’t yet figured out how to turn all her smart ideas into a fully realized feature.
  6. Lemon
    Reviewing Lemon feels like taking a sucker’s bet, treating the film with a reverence it never even asks for.
  7. I Smile Back
    Sarah Silverman burns through the indie drama “I Smile Back” without making the slightest move to gain our sympathy.
  8. Little Monsters
    The charismatic Nyong’o is easily the best part of this feeble Australian horror comedy.
  9. Tower Heist
    Tower Heist could and should have been much more. Mr. Ratner goes for the safe bet and the easy score.
  10. Untamed Heart
    Untamed Heart is to the mind what freshly discarded chewing gum is to the sole of a shoe: an irritant that slows movement without any real danger of stopping it.
  11. Sarah's Key
    Undone by its very premise: that the two stories it tells can coexist in the same film.
  12. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    Bilbo may fully learn a sense of friendship and duty, and have quite a story to tell, but somewhere along the way, Mr. Jackson loses much of the magic.
  13. Blueback
    It’s a mournful, stodgy, girl-meets-fish drama about the emotional cost of protecting the planet from its most rapacious predator: the land developer.
  14. The Silent Twins
    Whatever is or isn’t broken about the twins remains a secret, but June and Jennifer’s story is played by Wright and Lawrance with the thoughtful consideration these real-life women deserve.
  15. Between Two Ferns: The Movie
    Some promising ideas and characters are introduced, but the narrative is so superfluous, the connecting segments so fleeting, that little is fleshed out.
  16. Don't Move
    It is a beautifully made film - decorously composed, meticulously acted, cleanly photographed. But all of these qualities make it seem complacent and hypocritical when it wants to be honest and brave, and sentimental rather than emotionally daring.
  17. Army of Darkness
    Taken on its own terms, "Army of Darkness" displays some ambition and wit, though not nearly enough to lend it broad appeal.
  18. All Is True
    While All Is True might not brim with excitement, it’s beautifully acted, richly photographed (by Zac Nicholson) and blessedly free of histrionics. Between them, Branagh and Elton have concocted a respectful story of loss, regret and wistful genius.
  19. Winter Solstice
    The boys, particularly Mr. Webber as Pete, are astonishingly good, and Ms. Monaghan, who looks like a slightly more tomboyish Liv Tyler, makes a deep impression in a minor role. Mr. LaPaglia, of the television series "Without a Trace," brings a tender gravity to the shell-shocked Jim.
  20. Sleep Dealer
    The plot of Sleep Dealer is a bit thin, and the performances are earnest and dutiful. But there is sufficient ingenuity in the film’s main ideas to hold your attention, and the political implications of the allegorical story are at once obvious and subtle.
  21. Anywhere But Here
    Wang once again works splendidly with actresses, and boy, does he have a lot to work with this time.
  22. Happenstance
    Perhaps it's all a bit too much, and perhaps it doesn't add up, but the loose ends give the picture a jaunty, improvised feeling that, while it leads to some confusion, is ultimately part of its whimsical charm.
  23. The First Wives Club
    The film is played as witchy, all-star vamping with a lethal sting. What makes its premise especially funny is that, at heart, it's no laughing matter.
  24. The Child I Never Was
    The film is airless and mirthless, but it's hardly worthless; in fact in many ways it's more purposeful than the snuff-film scenes of an average "CSI" episode.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez
    Although Ms. Specogna's film fleshes out his life to the extent that it can -- leaning heavily on still photographs and interviewing loved ones, social workers and fellow Marines -- the portrait remains frustratingly incomplete.
  26. Only When I Dance
    The lack of information about the school, or about any aspect of the two dancers’ lives that doesn’t involve training for and competing in international competitions, can be startling. When another Centro de Dança student, a petite woman, is a winner at the prestigious Prix de Lausanne, we’re stunned. We didn’t even know she was there.
  27. My Afternoons with Margueritte
    The fine-boned, delicate-looking Ms. Casadesus, now 97, is a pleasure to watch. And the not-delicate-looking Mr. Depardieu does his usual excellent job. But their scenes together, if sweet enough, aren't particularly convincing or moving.
  28. This Is Where We Live
    Though the developing bond between the two men — one of whom is virtually nonverbal — is credible and even touching, the storytelling is too oblique to reel you in.
  29. Champs
    Now and then this documentary by Bert Marcus rises above mere promotion, leaving you wishing it had tackled the sport’s difficult questions in more depth.
  30. Henry Gamble's Birthday Party
    Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party feels sincere but not accomplished, empathetic but not deep.
  31. Amnesia
    Amnesia, Mr. Schroeder has said, is a story partly based on his mother, who refused to speak German, so perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s strongest when it focuses on Martha, a character Ms. Keller inhabits gracefully.
  32. Crooked House
    The superb cast provides mild pleasures, as do some aspects of the elaborate mystery itself. And that’s all, folks.
  33. Jirga
    Despite the performance’s credibility, few things are more irritating, artistically and historically, than the stranger-in-a-strange-land interloper who hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing.
  34. Judy & Punch
    What’s left is a baroque pantomime, a heavy-handed satire of intolerance whose fun fades faster than the livid bruises on Judy’s face.
  35. The Manor
    Despite some flat cinematography and borderline goofy special effects, The Manor gives us a distinctive 70-year-old woman as its protagonist and a twisty ending sure to polarize.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Battle Beyond the Stars
    There is a lot of stirring music on the soundtrack, and a fair amount of amusement in the audience. The special effects aren't bad, either.
  37. Humane
    This isn’t a movie with much to say, but it’s the sort of thought experiment that will keep you up at night.
  38. Green and Gold
    While it speaks well of Nelson’s integrity as a performer that he doesn’t make much effort to render Buck as ingratiating, the result is that the character can be a bit of a drag. His affection for his wife, Margaret (Annabel Armour), shows his softer side.
  39. Marc by Sofia
    Two creative decision makers more at ease behind the scenes, they are, perhaps, not the most natural chroniclers of their own careers and social lives, and as the film goes on, it strains to arrive at even the most basic personal revelations.
  40. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
    At times it felt as if this film might challenge Pixar’s decade-long reign, but that promise wanes. Instead, the movie is sometimes so strange, colorful and wildly cute that it may end up becoming a “Yellow Submarine” for a new generation.
  41. Rory O'Shea Was Here
    Better than the usual three-stage journey of courage, heartbreak and redemption. In this case, the triumph of the human spirit comes with a small bitter chaser.
  42. The Djinn
    The film betrays its own less-is-more philosophy and becomes weighed down by exposition — but it’s a tense, thrilling ride nonetheless.
  43. Godzilla vs. Kong
    An action movie made with lavish grandiosity, zero pretension and not too much originality.
  44. Cry Freedom
    Bewildering at some points and ineffectual at others, but it isn't dull. Its frankly grandiose style is transporting in its way, as is the story itself, even in this watered-down form.
  45. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    Ms. Miller has attempted to elevate a small Oedipal story about two damaged souls into a grandiloquent epic, Shakespeare by way of Bob Dylan. She misses by a significantly wide mark, largely because she loves her monster too much and his victim too little.
  46. Go for Sisters
    As long as Go for Sisters is focused on its characters, it remains on firm ground. But the flimsy detective story draped over them is underdeveloped and too sluggishly paced to take hold.
  47. What's Love Got to Do with It?
    A glossy lesson in how to pour nontraditional content into a traditional rom-com mold, Shekhar Kapur’s What’s Love Got to Do With It? shapes competing notions of happily-ever-after into comfort food.
  48. No Hard Feelings
    Lawrence is a consistently incandescent screen presence, and her role lets her run through her greatest performative hits, so to speak. She’s goofily sexy, poignantly wide-eyed and retains a beaming, you-can-deny-her-nothing smile.
  49. Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles
    Ultimately the results are eye-popping, sometimes almost confoundingly so.
  50. Doctor Sleep
    This screen adaptation feels like a clumsy hybrid. It’s a little too long and winding to work as a feature film, especially in the horror genre, and might have worked better as a limited series, with a little more room for the many characters who populate its grimly imagined American landscape.
  51. Cape of Good Hope
    Satisfying and memorable film.
  52. The Day Silence Died
    An easygoing exercise, impossible to dislike but not especially memorable, engaging but finally derivative:
  53. The Contender
    A cast that chews the scenery with such obvious enjoyment that you're happy to put up with its tin-eared oratory and preposterous plot turns for the sake of a good ride.
  54. Mystic Pizza
    Though in essence this is little more than a girls' romance novel brought to life, it has been filled with heart and humor. The place, the people and even the largely predictable situations in which they find themselves are presented in an entirely winning way.
  55. The Princess Blade
    Not quite good enough to jump out of the pack of Asian swordplay movies but is too well crafted to sink into utter anonymity.
  56. Fade to Black
    Even if the film could use some trimming, its hip-hop splendor proves hype-worthy.
  57. The Man Who Bought Mustique
    A compulsively watchable but repugnant portrait of a selfish eccentric born to privilege.
  58. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
    Where the original film was a cut-and-dried Pop-Art-flavored allegory pitting scientific hubris against the unpredictable, ungovernable forces of nature, the sequel is an all-stops-pulled, edge-of-your-seat adventure film whose messages are not so neatly packaged.
  59. Love! Valour! Compassion!
    One reason the film version of Terrence McNally's play Love! Valour! Compassion! is so moving is that this complicated group portrait never loses its slippery emotional footing.
  60. The Bostonians
    The moral ambiguity of James's novel has been skillfully captured in the film, as has its remarkable modernity.
  61. The Boy Downstairs
    How, and in whose apartment, Diana and Ben will confess their emotions is the subject of Ms. Brooks’s pallid dramedy, which leaves its actors looking somewhat stranded, as if waiting for Neil Simon zingers that were never written.
  62. Silver Bullets
    Silver Bullets neither pleases the eye nor stimulates the mind.
  63. The Rachel Divide
    Basic sympathy is where the usefulness of The Rachel Divide ends. Ms. Brownson hasn’t figured out how to construct a movie around a figure who essentially owes her fame to the obfuscation of her past. Anything Ms. Dolezal says has to be taken with such a large grain of salt that it’s not clear why it’s worth listening.
  64. J. Edgar
    Mr. Eastwood doesn't just shift between Hoover's past and present, his intimate life and popular persona, he also puts them into dialectic play, showing repeatedly how each informed the other.
  65. Streets of Fire
    For all its studied sultriness, the movie feels unsexy, perhaps because its inspiration is the kind of hard- hearted western that concentrates on manly combat while eschewing all sentiment.
  66. Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    [The film] is not perfect, but it is fast-moving, intermittently witty and pretty good fun.
  67. The Cartel
    Purports to be a documentary about the American public school system. In reality, however, it’s a bludgeoning rant against a single state — New Jersey — which it presents as a closed loop of Mercedes-owning administrators, obstructive teachers’ unions and corrupt school boards.
  68. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    After a sharp and promising start, she (Ms. Scafaria) allows the movie to collapse into a mild, lump-in-the-throat romantic comedy that is not made significantly more urgent or interesting by the prospect of global calamity.
  69. Alien 3
    Alien 3 belongs to that branch of fantasy comics, best exemplified by the "Road Warrior" movies, in which the iron and space ages meet for dizzy results.
  70. The Railway Man
    Mr. Firth gives a reserved, compelling performance.
  71. Pocahontas
    Gloriously colorful, cleverly conceived and set in motion with the usual Disney vigor, Pocahontas is one more landmark feat of animation.
  72. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye
    The documentary, which subscribes to the Great Man school of reverential portraiture, is not a biography but an interview (in French, simultaneously translated into English) conceived as a master class on art appreciation, with guest commentators augmenting Cartier-Bresson's own sparsely chosen words.
  73. Extraordinary Tales
    Harnessing a range of appropriately spooky-oddball narrators and striking visual styles — including graphic novels, early photography and Expressionist painting — the Spanish director and animator Raul Garcia simultaneously honors and reimagines.
  74. Follow That Bird
    The teaching of letters and numbers, for which Sesame Street is famous, is played down here in favor of messages about getting along.
  75. Torn Hearts
    Unfortunately, the script is too disjointed to keep its own complex characters afloat. Little is revealed as the plot bounces from one climax to another, making any eventual bloodshed feel exhausting and unearned.
  76. Pretty Problems
    An overlong, undercooked comedy of manners about how, yes, indeed the rich are different.
  77. Sing
    The aggregate effect is like aesthetic insulin shock, albeit from an artificial sweetener.
  78. Deja Vu
    The joke of it is, for all the pricey bangs and booms, the whiplash cinematography and the editing that turns film space into cubistic tableaux, a Bruckheimer-and-Scott partnership is only as good as its screenplay, and this one is a mess.
  79. Lizzie
    Lizzie isn’t perfect — the pacing can flag, and the lovely Kim Dickens, as Lizzie’s older sister, barely registers — but Ms. Sevigny’s intelligence and formidable control keep the melodrama grounded. Her empathy for Borden, whose fragile constitution belies a searing will, is palpable, as is the sense of inescapable peril surrounding the two female leads.
  80. Change of Plans (Le code a changé)
    Diverting, hectic entertainment, which refuses to take anything too seriously, staking out a middle ground between melodrama and farce.
  81. Loudmouth
    As straightforward as it appears, Loudmouth also invites an engaged but necessarily judicious scrutiny.
  82. Cocaine Cowboys
    Cocaine Cowboys is a tabloid headline, a movie as oppressive and inarticulate as the lives it represents.
  83. The Mask
    An astonishingly lazy and perfunctory effort that does little to realize his (Carrey) comic potential.
  84. The Playroom
    The Playroom captures the malaise of mid-’70s suburbia with a merciless accuracy not seen since Ang Lee’s 1997 film, “The Ice Storm.”
  85. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
    The great surprise of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere — a solid, very likable, very affecting drama about an anguished period in the life of the young Bruce Springsteen — is that it doesn’t shy away from soul-deep pain.
  86. Fight or Flight
    Hartnett and Chandran’s laid back chemistry steady the film’s turbulent tonal shifts, adding a punch that the shakily choreographed action lacks.
  87. Creepshow
    The best things about Creepshow are its carefully simulated comic-book tackiness and the gusto with which some good actors assume silly positions. Horror film purists may object to the levity even though failed, as a lot of it is.
  88. Heartbreaker
    Yes, Heartbreaker is diverting, intermittently charming and occasionally funny, but it is also a jumble of jammed-together notions. Unevenly paced, it goes on too many tangents to cohere as a persuasive comic fable about love and money.
  89. The Lovebirds
    Rae and Nanjiani do their best, but neither the dialogue nor the direction serves their talents adequately.
  90. Mr. Holland's Opus
    In Mr. Holland's Opus, Mr. Dreyfuss gives a warm and really touching performance. He's firmly in control of the film's comic moments and just as comfortable delivering the film's calculatingly Capraesque payoff: a good cry.
  91. On the Basis of Sex
    On the Basis of Sex does a brisk, coherent job of articulating what Ginsburg accomplished and why it mattered, dramatizing both her personal stake in feminist legal activism and the intellectual discipline with which she approached it.
  92. Beyond the Gates
    Getting retro right is harder than it seems.
  93. Bitter Melon
    Although the first hour of Bitter Melon is a spiky and absorbing story of repressed feelings, the movie grinds to a halt in its final third as the characters talk things out, which might be helpful in life but in drama tends to belabor the obvious, as well as offer an easy exit.
  94. Run All Night
    The movie, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who directed Mr. Neeson in the efficient airborne thriller “Non-Stop,” has two saving graces: a tight script and terrific acting.
  95. The Black Cauldron
    This is the 25th full-length animated feature from Walt Disney studios, and professionally put together as it is, many of the ingredients may seem programmed to those who have seen some of the others.
  96. Matthew Barney: No Restraint
    Alison Chernick's film skims the surface of a strange and celebrated career. After a meager 72 minutes, the man who once stretched an obsession with testicles into a five-film cycle remains as unknowable as ever.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Finian's Rainbow
    The cast is full of children who act as artificially and insincerely as the whole enterprise, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, would suggest.
  98. We Own the Night
    The problem with We Own the Night is that it mistakes sentiment for profundity, and takes its ideas about character and fate more seriously than it takes its characters and their particular fates. “I feel light as a feather,” Bobby says in a crucial scene, at which point the movie starts to sink like a stone.
  99. I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life & Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal
    Dismayingly, bad filmmaking isn't really to blame for the lack of punch in Ever Again. Perhaps it's the familiarity of it all.
  100. The Gutter
    In addition to ridiculous — think the Wayans brothers’ parody pictures, or “Napoleon Dynamite” (that movie’s director, Jared Hess, is an executive producer here) — the humor is almost uniformly broad.
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