The New York Times' Scores

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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
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  1. Pariah
    At its heart is an incandescent performance by Ms. Oduye, who captures the jagged mood swings of late adolescence with a wonderfully spontaneous fluency.
  2. The Darkest Hour
    Really, how slovenly is it to use invisible aliens? If you're going to tease us with nothing but pinwheels of light for three-quarters of the film, you'd better have one heck of a reveal up your sleeve.
  3. Don 2
    If "Mission: Impossible" and "Ocean's Eleven" had a bombastic, funny and slick cousin, it might be Don 2.
  4. Miss Minoes
    It's a Christmas present for cat lovers. Miss Minoes, the tweaked title of a 2001 Dutch film by Vincent Bal, is being given an American theatrical run (dubbed into English), and it's a pleasantly quirky, family-friendly fable with lots of meowing.
  5. In the Land of Blood and Honey
    Both Ms. Marjanovic and Mr. Kostic are very fine (like the rest of the cast they deliver their dialogue in Bosnian) and they navigate the contradictions of their characters' feelings, the flashes of hate, the surrender to desire, with delicacy.
  6. Pina
    The cumulative effect is exhilarating and also a bit frustrating, since so many dances are included and woven together the audience does not have the chance to experience any single work in its entirety. But the power and intelligence of Bausch's approach, which at times seems more cerebral than sensual, is communicated.
  7. 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.
  8. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    Yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage.
  9. War Horse
    You may find yourself resisting this sentimental pageant of early-20th-century rural English life, replete with verdant fields, muddy tweeds and damp turnips, but my strong advice is to surrender.
  10. The Flowers of War
    Mr. Bale, turning in a respectable if oddly chipper performance under the circumstances, has the unfortunate task of playing a character who doesn't really add up.
  11. The Adventures of Tintin
    Like the screen Tintin, the movie proves less than inviting because it's been so wildly overworked: there is hardly a moment of downtime, a chance to catch your breath or contemplate the tension between the animated Expressionism and the photo-realist flourishes.
  12. Albert Nobbs
    Ms. McTeer's sly, exuberant performance is a pure delight, and the counterpoint between her physical expressiveness and Ms. Close's tightly coiled reserve is a marvel to behold. The rest of the film is a bit too decorous and tidy to count as a major revelation, but it dispenses satisfying doses of humor, pathos and surprise.
  13. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    There are waves of brilliantly orchestrated anxiety and confusion but also long stretches of drab, hackneyed exposition that flatten the atmosphere. We might be watching "Cold Case" or "Criminal Minds," but with better sound design and more expressive visual techniques.
  14. Cook County
    What we need is for the writer and director, David Pomes, to wallow less in aimless dialogue and lowlife sordidness. What we need is a point.
  15. The Pill
    This might be more entertaining if any of the three main characters were at all likable.
  16. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
    No swear words here; just harmless fun.
  17. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    Gets back to action basics with globe-trotting, nifty gadgets, high-flying stunts and less loquacious villainy.
  18. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    There is a plot, but no real intrigue, mystery or suspense, and no inkling of anything at stake beyond a childish and belligerent idea of fun.
  19. Sleepless Nights Stories
    Mr. Mekas makes little attempt to smooth out his transitions between takes or scenes, which only reinforces the intensely personal, even handmade nature of the work.
  20. Carnage
    As a portrait of anxious, status-conscious Brooklyn parents living in a chiaroscuro of self-righteousness and guilt, Carnage misses its mark badly.
  21. Addiction Incorporated
    Straight-shooting, hard-hitting and fuming with contempt for the tobacco industry, Addiction Incorporated would be almost too exhausting to watch were it not for the folksy charm of its star witness.
  22. Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl
    Ladies vs Ricky Bahl has much to recommend it at first, not least its premise.
  23. Seducing Charlie Barker
    An intermittently interesting but fatally clichéd comedy of personal and professional suicide.
  24. Red Hook Black
    Red Hook Black crawls forward by means of stilted conversations and vacuous exchanges.
  25. Fanny, Annie & Danny
    Characters this nicely etched deserve a more complete conclusion.
  26. 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.
  27. My Piece of the Pie
    Paints an alluring picture of a pan-European cosmopolitan culture whose characters hopscotch from one country to another with hardly a second thought in a lighthearted floating party.
  28. In Darkness
    It is suspenseful, horrifying and at times intensely moving. But the ease with which it elicits these responses from the audience feels more opportunistic than insightful.
  29. New Year's Eve
    A depressing two-hour infomercial pitching Times Square as the only place in the universe you want to be when the ball drops at midnight on Dec. 31. (Believe me, it's not.)
  30. The Sitter
    Some of it, though, is absurdly comic, like the shot of a guy on a Segway that exists for no reason other than that someone here thought the movie could use a small laugh right then. It did. It could use more.
  31. London River
    Rachid Bouchareb's tidy little two-character film, London River, demonstrates how great acting can infuse a banal, politically correct drama with dollops of emotional truth.
  32. I Melt with You
    When a sheriff's deputy (Carla Gugino) visits the house, I Melt With You turns into a ludicrous, cheap horror thriller that sheds any claims to integrity. By the end, you feel nothing, not even contempt.
  33. We Need to Talk About Kevin
    Ms. Ramsay, with ruthless ingenuity, creates a deeper dread and a more acute feeling of anticipation by allowing us to think we know what is coming and then shocking us with the extent of our ignorance.
  34. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    A pleasurably sly and involving puzzler - a mystery about mysteries within mysteries.
  35. Young Adult
    Shorter than a bad blind date and as sour as a vinegar Popsicle, Young Adult shrouds its brilliant, brave and breathtakingly cynical heart in the superficial blandness of commercial comedy.
  36. Under Control
    Somehow the happy screams of children whirling above a neutered reactor sound a lot less comforting than they should.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The First Rasta
    The movement defies definition and thus invites it. And yeah, the music is pretty good.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Journey in My Mother's Footsteps
    Rosenmeier's tendency to insert herself at the center of the story - awkwardly drifting into the frame as she interviews local social workers, carefully inspecting institutions as if she were a high-profile ambassador - at first seems slightly immodest. Gradually, it suggests a deeply unsettling level of self-involvement.
  39. Lads & Jockeys
    Lads & Jockeys conveys first-race terrors and last-place humiliation with indulgent thoroughness.
  40. The Big Fix
    The film's most upsetting scenes are its interviews with residents whose livelihood has been decimated and whose health has been compromised.
  41. 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.
  42. House of Pleasures
    Throughout the film there is an abundance of sumptuously photographed flesh on view. But House of Pleasures is not an erotic stimulant so much as a slow-moving, increasingly tragic and claustrophobic operatic pageant set almost entirely in the brothel.
  43. The Yellow Sea
    A rush of a movie from South Korea that slips and slides from horror to humor on rivers of blood and offers the haunting image of a man, primitive incarnate, beating other men with an enormous, gnawed-over meat bone.
  44. Outrage
    Not everything is as elegantly executed, including a tiresome, would-be comic subplot involving an African diplomat and a clandestine casino that drags the story down badly and comes close to noxious racial stereotype.
  45. Sleeping Beauty
    Though the tone is quiet and the pacing serenely unhurried, Sleeping Beauty is at times almost screamingly funny, a pointed, deadpan surrealist sex farce that Luis Buñuel might have admired.
  46. Coriolanus
    Then too there's the sheer pleasure of hearing these words spoken by an actor like Mr. Fiennes, whose phrasing is so brilliant, you might be tempted to close your eyes if his physical performance weren't equally mesmerizing.
  47. 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.
  48. An African Election
    As we join throngs of excited citizens at a public vote-counting, their uninhibited zeal for the process only highlights the jaded cynicism that threatens to overwhelm our own.
  49. Khodorkovsky
    The prisoner rather eloquently portrays himself as a victim of human rights abuse.
  50. Crazy Wisdom: The Life & Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
    The movie goes mushy when it should be critical, and leaves you with questions that it's not prepared to answer.
  51. A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
    It is a crowded, complex crime story that is also a tale of sexual awakening and an understated exercise in kitchen-sink realism. In short - or rather at mesmerizing, necessary length - this film has everything, and is well worth a day of your life.
  52. Romantics Anonymous
    Romantics Anonymous might vaporize if the director and the actors didn't have such easy command over the tone of this singularly Gallic fairy tale. If you added a dozen songs and brought it to the stage it would be completely at home.
  53. The Artist
    This is not a work of film history but rather a generous, touching and slightly daffy expression of unbridled movie love.
  54. Rampart
    A sun-scorched noir, Rampart tells a familiar story with such visual punch and hustling energy that it comes close to feeling like a new kind of movie, though it's more just a tough gloss on American crime stories past.
  55. Hugo
    Waves of melancholy wash over the story and keep the treacle at bay, as do the spasms of broad comedy, much of it nimbly executed by Mr. Baron Cohen.
  56. A Dangerous Method
    Full of ideas about sexuality - some quite provocative, even a century after their first articulation - but it also recognizes and communicates the erotic power of ideas.
  57. 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.
  58. My Week with Marilyn
    Ms. Williams tries her best, and sometimes that's almost enough.
  59. The Muppets
    The rainbow connection is a smooth, unbroken arch.
  60. Garbo: The Spy
    Edmon Roch has a great story to tell in Garbo the Spy, and he recounts it with the flair of a Hollywood spy movie: "Garbo" is dramatic, entertaining, even funny in parts.
  61. Silver Tongues
    Filled with joyless people in drab rooms (Josh Silfen's grubby cinematography doesn't make things any cheerier), Silver Tongues takes a novel idea and uses it to jerk us around. Swirling with unease, its scenes set us up for a payoff that never materializes and strand its actors in a bitter present.
  62. In Heaven Underground: The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery
    The sense of place may be expected, but it's also poetic and exquisite.
  63. Dzi Croquettes
    If the film doesn't measure up as a piece of historical scholarship, it does manage to be a rather touching exploration of the troupe's life cycle: achieving notoriety, then being torn apart by fame, then being destroyed by forces beyond its control.
  64. The Greater Good
    This emotionally manipulative, heavily partial look at the purported link between autism and childhood immunization would much rather wallow in the distress of specific families than engage with the needs of the population at large.
  65. The Lie
    Comprising small, near-perfect scenes played out largely at dinner tables and on couches, The Lie wonders if it's possible to rewrite lives and remake choices.
  66. Another Happy Day
    Like its recent forerunners, "Rachel Getting Married" and "Margot at the Wedding," Another Happy Day is both anguished and histrionic and in its strongest moments very, very good. But it is also overpopulated, strident and constitutionally unable to step back and scrutinize itself.
  67. The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch
    About halfway through, the wheeling and dealing becomes so elaborate and the villains so numerous that the only way to enjoy the movie is to let its preposterous story wash over as you sit back and take in the scenery.
  68. Rid of Me
    An ingenious black comedy written and directed by James Westby, comes at you like a horror movie before settling down into something quieter but equally skin crawling.
  69. Happy Feet Two
    An amiable sequel with not much on its mind other than funny and creaky jokes, and waves of understated beauty.
  70. Tyrannosaur
    The characters are trapped, suffocated, pushed through a story that gives them very little room or time to figure themselves out, and that finally turns their feelings into the wan stuff of fable.
  71. Eames: The Architect & The Painter
    The most gratifying thing about "Eames" is that it shows, in marvelous detail, how their work was an extension of themselves and how their distinct personalities melded into a unique and protean force.
  72. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    The latest and best of the movies about a girl, her vampire and their impossible, ridiculously appealing - yes, I surrendered - love story.
  73. Tomboy
    The story that emerges is programmatic and largely unsurprising, but these children give it messiness, joy and life.
  74. The Descendants
    To call The Descendants perfect would be a kind of insult, a betrayal of its commitment to, and celebration of, human imperfection. Its flaws are impossible to distinguish from its pleasures.
  75. God's Fiddler: Jascha Heifetz
    The film, though generous with doses of Heifetz in performance, isn't entirely successful at illuminating the man.
  76. A Novel Romance
    Steve Guttenberg is probably supposed to be a lovable loser in A Novel Romance, a drab, clumsy film by Allie Dvorin, but he can manage to be merely annoying. Mr. Guttenberg, though, deserves only part of the blame for this unrewarding movie.
  77. Barbershop Punk
    An engaging, provocative documentary.
  78. The Greening of Whitney Brown
    As she learns the value of public schools and pickup trucks, her erstwhile friends in Philadelphia seem happy to be rid of her. By movie's end, you'll feel exactly the same.
  79. London Boulevard
    Cultivation and fine manners are nowhere to be found in the foul urban cesspool of William Monahan's London Boulevard. This palpitating mess of a movie certainly doesn't lack for pungent atmosphere.
  80. Dog Sweat
    Dog Sweat (the title is slang for alcohol) is surprisingly polished, the young actors warmly believable despite being restricted by the film's narrow focus.
  81. Inni
    The best concert films achieve a marriage of sound and image that feels effortlessly harmonious, and in that regard Inni, a musical portrait of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, leaves most of its genre in the dust.
  82. Jack and Jill
    There are a few funny moments in Jack and Jill, most of them celebrity cameos that also serve to affirm what a cool, connected celebrity Mr. Sandler is. The most sustained of these is the appearance of Al Pacino as himself, falling for Jill and giving the film a jolt of genuine zaniness. I'm sorry to say that this may be Mr. Pacino's most convincing performance in years.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Immortals
    Immortals is the latest disaster of post-conversion 3-D, a projected spectacle so dark it is literally hard to see. This is an ugly, burlap sack of a film, stitched with jagged seams and overstuffed with computer-generated chintz, gold-lamé leotards and fetishistic headgear.
  84. The Love We Make
    Captured mostly in gorgeous black and white, The Love We Make is alternately trite, touching, funny and fascinating.
  85. The Conquest
    The movie, which begins with Mr. Sarkozy's election-night victory in May 2007, only intermittently rises above the tone of an arch, sniping drawing-room comedy peopled with mild caricatures.
  86. Letters from the Big Man
    The woman in Christopher Munch's lovely, delightfully idiosyncratic Letters From the Big Man, resplendent with its own dense forests and cloudy Oregon days, has already fallen to earth and is looking for a way back up or maybe just forward. She gets help from a sasquatch.
  87. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
    The carnage, although explicit and frequent, is not grotesquely overdone. But except for Mr. Moura's Nascimento, the movie doesn't have the same richness of characters. Psychologically he is the whole show; the rest are stereotypes.
  88. Into the Abyss
    Into the Abyss superficially resembles the kind of titillating, moralizing true-crime shockumentary that is a staple of off-hours cable television. But the grim ordinariness of the narrative makes its Dostoyevskian dimensions all the more arresting.
  89. Melancholia
    Melancholia is emphatically not what anyone would call a feel-good movie, and yet it nonetheless leaves behind a glow of aesthetic satisfaction.
  90. 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.
  91. The Look
    This is not to say that Charlotte Rampling: The Look is a complete washout. A tease is more like it, an examination of the surface. Ms. Rampling is presented as an endlessly watchable mystery, an aloof but affable sphinx. But we knew that already.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In the Family
    Mr. Wang's slow-reveal psychological drama isn't just a showcase for his excellent ensemble cast. Beautifully modulated and stylistically sui generis, In the Family is also one of the most accomplished and undersold directorial debuts this year.
  93. Stuck Between Stations
    There are no easy payoffs in Stuck Between Stations, but the chemistry of its stars is reward enough.
  94. Dragonslayer
    Seamlessly dovetailing style and subject, Dragonslayer, a poetic and affectionate portrait of the professional skateboarder Josh Sandoval.
  95. Cherkess
    Mr. Quandour's utopian vision may seem improbable - that fairy tale quality again - but his odd, guileless, folkloric movie doesn't feel cloying so much as something from a different world.
  96. Killing Bono
    What could have been a moderately entertaining short film is yanked to intolerable lengths in Killing Bono, a shapeless rock-music caper that, like its deluded antihero, just doesn't know when to stop.
  97. And They're Off
    For a mockumentary to work, the writing has to be spot on. But the script by Alan Grossbard, who shows a fond familiarity with, if not great insight into, the racing milieu, has too many half-baked characters and goes soft just when it should get sharp.
  98. A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
    N.P.H, as he's often called in these films, does indeed return, singing and dancing. And talking dirty. He, that stoned baby and a stunning riff on the tongue-stuck-to-a-pole scene in "A Christmas Story" will, for fans of this franchise, make this a blissful holiday season indeed.
  99. Pianomania
    Although there's more romance in "Buck," a classic American survivor story in the triumphant individual vein, in Pianomania the very dry, very accomplished Mr. Knüpfer makes engaging company both because he keeps enviable company and because he's a full-on geek, though one possessed by pianos.
  100. The Son of No One
    The Son of No One self-destructs in a ludicrous, ineptly directed anticlimactic rooftop showdown in which bodies pile up, and nothing makes a shred of sense.
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