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. Kansas City
    If the movie, which uses blues-based Kansas City jazz as a raucous, nonverbal Greek chorus, lacks the emotional range of Mr. Altman's masterpiece, ''Nashville,'' it still has its own brawling vitality.
  2. Chungking Express
    While its slender, two-tiered plot links love affairs that happen largely by accident, the film's real interest seems to lie in raffish affectation. Mr. Wong has legitimate visual flair, but his characters spend an awful lot of time playing impish tricks.
  3. I Send You This Place
    Less a documentary than an experimental essay tapping age-old notions of the sublime, it’s a perplexing artifact that flirts with the banal yet moves with lovely intuitive rhythms.
  4. 100 Bloody Acres
    This fairly rote tale of rural ghouls and their passing-through prey has its own hick charm, mostly because of performers who never overplay their hands.
  5. How to Make Money Selling Drugs
    There’s a lot to learn from How to Make Money Selling Drugs, but sometimes there’s just a lot.
  6. Some Girl(s)
    There are a lot of truthful notes in Some Girl(s), but there are also false ones that let you know that you are being played with. You’d best beware.
  7. Chef
    [A] shallow but enjoyable all-American morality play.
  8. Three Worlds
    Each thread of the plot is followed to its dangling, ragged conclusion in a movie that may be painful to watch but that maintains a chilly integrity.
  9. Touchy Feely
    Its humor is softer and more ambiguous than that of Ms. Shelton’s earlier films, and its characters are harder to pin down.
  10. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
    Watching it is like spending a day at an amusement park, which is probably what Mr. Spielberg and his associates intended. It moves tirelessly from one ride or attraction to the next, only occasionally taking a minute out for a hot dog, and then going right on to the next unspeakable experience.
  11. The Look of Love
    Had The Look of Love focused more acutely on the father-daughter relationship or explored Mr. Raymond’s relationships with his two sons, only one of whom appears briefly, it might have amounted to something more substantial than a keenly observed period piece that keeps a celebrity journalist’s distance from its subject.
  12. Creating Freedom: The Lottery of Birth
    On its own terms — setting aside the likelihood of knee-jerk political objections to its mission — it’s more convincing than many films pegged to specific causes.
  13. Homefront
    The movie is as blunt an instrument as the poster, but it’s also crammed with enough moving parts and unexpected distractions (Winona Ryder as a “meth whore”) to make it an indefensibly enjoyable piece of exploitation hackwork.
  14. Thanks for Sharing
    The movie never transcends a screenwriting formula that makes you uncomfortably aware of the machinery driving it all.
  15. Ghanchakkar
    The script, written by Mr. Gupta with Parveez Sheikh, has some engaging mysteries and witty payoffs. But the story is stretched too thin, blunting some of its more interesting ideas.
  16. Afternoon Delight
    Whether or not you wince, this meticulously acted movie, which won Ms. Soloway a directing award at the Sundance Film Festival, paints an accurate picture of how a segment of youngish, educated, affluent, white Americans converse. It is anything but inspiring.
  17. Child's Pose
    It’s too bad that the filmmakers don’t allow an occasional breath of air into the sepulchral proceedings or ease up on the increasingly heavy-handed lessons.
  18. The Broken Circle Breakdown
    [A] touching love story and soggy family melodrama.
  19. Ways to Live Forever
    A little wan but a lot likable, Gustavo Ron’s Ways to Live Forever is a forthright and surprisingly buoyant drama about facing death before you have really lived.
  20. Man of Tai Chi
    The fight is the thing in Man of Tai Chi, Keanu Reeves’s down-and-dirty and generally diverting directing debut.
  21. Godzilla
    It is at once bloated and efficient, executed with tremendous discipline and intelligence and conceived with not too much of either.
  22. First Comes Love
    The approach is cheerfully candid and the humor often sly... Yet this midlife confessional could have reached beyond the maternal cravings of highly educated, urban-dwelling singletons had it plumbed people’s heads as thoroughly as Ms. Davenport’s birth canal.
  23. Brain Donors
    Brain Donors is a short, reasonably snappy attempt at nothing less than a present-day Marx Brothers comedy,
  24. Postales (Postcards)
    While the film is let down by its plot, it is much too smart for reductive visions of “the other.” And there are moments, like a heartfelt exchange of keepsakes, when seeing Postales is a memory worth preserving.
  25. Romeo & Juliet
    A sufficiently entertaining, adamantly old-fashioned adaptation that follows the play’s general outline without ever rising to the passionate intensity of its star-cross’d crazy kids.
  26. Breakup at a Wedding
    Everything goes pretty much as you guess it’s going to, but the conceit of seeing the whole story through the eyes of the videographer adds a dimension to the familiar goings-on.
  27. The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
    Mr. Zizek’s daisy-chained improvisations amount to an argument on behalf of complexity and unseen depths, and, like much academic writing, it risks monotony and becoming as reductive as it can be seductive.
  28. The Trials of Muhammad Ali
    The film falls short of explaining Mr. Ali, who, like many outspoken individuals, can stubbornly repel scrutiny, nor will it pacify the many who opposed his conscientious objections. But it also underlines one enduring quality: namely, that he probably couldn’t care less what people think.
  29. Tiny Times 2.0
    As entertainment, this is vintage potboiler fare. But the movie is also revealing as fantasy, an artifact of 21st-century China’s youth culture transfixed by its rising fortunes and Western ways.
  30. Bad Milo!
    What could have been a very funny short film about self-control and befriending your id instead becomes a rambling commentary on father-son dysfunction and the limits of proctology.
  31. Mademoiselle C
    The filmmaking has some of the wit and irreverence of its subject, but goes on meandering tangents rather than having a cohesive vision or tone.
  32. Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride
    Though not terribly nuanced, a bit muddled and lacking certain perspectives, “Zipper” drives home the fragile identity of even the city’s signature locales and the alarming cultural myopia of much redevelopment.
  33. The Happy Sad
    The actors are so relaxed and personable that the film’s occasional glibness — and its over-reliance on coincidence to further the cross-pollinating narrative — is easy to let slide.
  34. Herblock: The Black & the White
    It’s fortunate that the cartoons on display are such instantly satisfying works of popular genius, because, despite its subject, “Herblock” shows how even an edifying talking-heads documentary bumps up against the limitations of the format.
  35. Drew: The Man Behind the Poster
    At length, the cheerleading...becomes a mildly taxing torrent. And Mr. Struzan, while an agreeable presence, is not an especially engrossing speaker. But then there is his artwork, an essential aid to the movies — and often their superior.
  36. Ip Man: The Final Fight
    Seriously, if not always elegantly, the film portrays the great Ip Man as someone trying to survive, which is to say just as often a victim as a victor.
  37. The United States of Football
    The film is a thorough piece of reporting on the issues, characters and deeper cultural ramifications. But rather than present this impressive investigation as an objective reporter, Mr. Pamphilon makes the film, perhaps unnecessarily, a personal story.
  38. Chappie
    Even at his shakiest, Mr. Blomkamp holds your attention with stories about characters banding together to emerge from a hell not of their own making, a liberation journey that just isn’t the same old, same old when a director was born in South Africa.
  39. The Zero Theorem
    Even as Mr. Gilliam assails the tedium and pointlessness of Qohen’s existence, The Zero Theorem succumbs to those forces, spinning its wheels and repeating its jokes in a manic frenzy that is never as funny or as mind-blowing as it wants to be.
  40. Go Grandriders
    It’s like a cheap, dry cake covered with a thick layer of frosting. But even bad cake can be enjoyable, especially if celebrating something as worthwhile as these elders, their long lives and their continued gutsiness so late in the game.
  41. Wampler's Ascent
    It’s then, as nature documentary and inspirational device, that Wampler’s Ascent finds its power.
  42. Broadway Idiot
    As a chronicle of how one rock star slowly fell victim to the Broadway bug, it’s kind of amusing.
  43. The Last Time I Saw Macao
    A sly, amusing if underconceptulized and needlessly elliptical inquiry into truth, memory and appearances.
  44. Willow Creek
    Mr. Goldthwait exercises so much caution that you want to get behind his characters and push.
  45. American Made Movie
    American Made Movie ends up feeling as if it were built from well-known facts and wishful thinking.
  46. The Last Christeros
    Mr. Meyer adheres to a cinema of broad experience by casting rugged but uninspiring nonprofessionals and focusing on the rebels’ long, lonely struggle rather than on triumph and tactics.
  47. We Are What We Are
    It’s all a little silly, but Mr. Mickle’s restrained gravity stifles the impulse to laugh.
  48. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie
    Couch-potato comedy can't get any lazier than Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, but that counts for most of this film's slender charm. [19 Apr 1996, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  49. GMO OMG
    To the informed consumer hoping for greater elucidation, Mr. Seifert’s partisan, oversimplified survey falls short.
  50. Morning
    Acute emotional honesty and a frustrating narrative coyness coincide in Morning.
  51. Concussion
    Ms. Passon ultimately seems to skirt some of the larger life questions hinted at along the way.
  52. Informant
    Mr. Meltzer doesn’t quite find an effective tone or structure to stay on top of his unsettling person of interest.
  53. Price of Gold
    A noncommittal, occasionally surreal portrait of hardscrabble lives and omnipresent risk.
  54. The Railway Man
    Mr. Firth gives a reserved, compelling performance.
  55. Ghost Team One
    It’s not the derivative scares and rudimentary effects that keep this low-budget effort percolating but the improvisational energy of Mr. Santos and Mr. Villarreal, whose ease, chemistry and humor never flag.
  56. The Double
    It never quite rises to the full potential of its theme or fully inhabits its intricately imagined space. It’s cool but not haunting — a brainteaser rather than a mindblower.
  57. American Promise
    Race is raised as a possible reason for Idris’s and Seun’s problems, and then other potential determinants (a learning disorder, illness) are introduced. But the filmmakers don’t engage with these life events and issues: They just line them up as if their significance were transparent.
  58. Moebius
    Mr. Kim does show an abiding concern here for the unsubtle realities of human libido and cruelty, but he’s alarmingly tone-deaf as he makes his points, and shows disregard for his female characters as he uses them up.
  59. Stray Dogs
    Until it goes haywire with the cabbage scene, Stray Dogs sustains a hypnotic intensity anchored in exquisite cinematography that portrays the modern industrial cityscape as a chilly wasteland.
  60. How I Live Now
    As sun-dappled infatuation abruptly crashes into post-apocalyptic survival, Mr. Macdonald struggles to balance a nebulous narrative on tentpole moments of rich emotional resonance.
  61. Arise
    Arise always feels unified, a genuinely felt and executed womanist letter to the world.
  62. Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon
    Mr. Gordon is likable, though it would be naïve to think he is unaware of cultivating his own image here.
  63. The Time Is... Now
    The Time Is ... Now is a well-meaning if congenitally flawed bit of uplift about how to endure catastrophe and violence in a world that has no shortage of either.
  64. Wedding Palace
    While the story is a bit weak, the film does a good job of contrasting Korean-Americans who steadfastly adhere to the traditions of their homeland with South Koreans who have renounced old customs.
  65. The Dead Man and Being Happy
    Stories of humanized hit men make for a small but well-trod patch of screenwriting terrain, but The Dead Man and Being Happy quickly transcends that territory to become a beguiling road movie.
  66. Enzo Avitabile Music Life
    The fuzziness of Mr. Avitabile’s sentiments on boundary-blind unity is echoed in the movie’s slack, tag-along portraiture.
  67. 2 Jacks
    Written and directed by Bernard Rose (“Immortal Beloved”), 2 Jacks has a pleasing circular structure, and it doesn’t push the parallels between old and new Hollywood to absurd limits.
  68. Girl on a Bicycle
    It’s all light as a feather, with Jeremy Leven, the writer and director, landing some good multinational jokes along the way.
  69. In the Name Of
    Encouraging sensitive performances that mitigate the film’s sluggish pace and fuzzy narrative, Ms. Szumowska juxtaposes two-person scenes of wordless intimacy with group expressions of casual violence.
  70. Forgetting the Girl
    Its characterizations may be overwrought — it is a thriller, after all — and the audience might prefer to have sympathy for a character without being practically told to feel it. But the acting is strong.
  71. The Little Bedroom
    The Little Bedroom is a gentle, melancholy drama so pale and tentative that its very colors appear washed away by grief.
  72. Bettie Page Reveals All
    No life is seamless, and not every biographical portrait needs to be, but this one is so riddled with awkward transitions, including on the soundtrack, that it tends to lurch distractingly, as if Mr. Mori were still trying to figure out how to piece the whole thing together.
  73. Gone Girl
    At its strongest, Gone Girl plays like a queasily, at times gleefully, funny horror movie about a modern marriage, one that has disintegrated partly because of spiraling downward mobility and lost privilege. Yet, as sometimes happens in Mr. Fincher’s work, dread descends like winter shadows, darkening the movie’s tone and visuals until it’s snuffed out all the light, air and nuance.
  74. House in the Alley
    [A] slight exercise, which, for all its modesty, generates a measure of dread.
  75. Out Loud
    That the movie exists at all attests to the courage of the participants to see it through to the end. Out Loud bleeds with sincerity.
  76. Bridging the Gap
    Blithely hokey, amusingly eager to distract and rather entertaining, the film resembles a children’s travel show with music-video elements more than it resembles a straight-up documentary.
  77. Breakfast with Curtis
    Desultory, dauntingly DIY but secretly efficient, Breakfast With Curtis is something like a leafy summer afternoon in movie form.
  78. Golden Slumbers
    Golden Slumbers has a tendency to wallow in its romanticism, not to the point of trivializing its history, but definitely dropping off into somnolence.
  79. Maidentrip
    Before our eyes, Laura’s lengthening limbs and deepening introspection become the point of a movie that begins with a child and ends with a young woman.
  80. Contracted
    The ending to this fable misses the opportunity for broader metaphorical resonance, but getting there has its own unnerving rewards.
  81. Geography Club
    The film is at its strongest when Russell and Kevin face tests of their character brought on by their interactions with homophobic students.
  82. Jersey Boys
    Jersey Boys is a strange movie, and it’s a Clint Eastwood enterprise, both reasons to see it.
  83. Cousin Jules
    Cousin Jules is in many ways a wonder to see and hear, but there is less to it than meets the eye.
  84. Gori Tere Pyaar Mein
    Instead of one satisfyingly complex film, it’s two or three films in one, a turducken of comedies.
  85. Paddington
    In stark contrast to their furry, blundering star, the makers of Paddington have colored so carefully inside the lines that any possibility of surprise or subversion is effectively throttled.
  86. The Punk Singer
    Ms. Hanna’s creativity and force are catching. But other voices are needed to evaluate her achievements with a fuller sense of cultural context and perspective.
  87. Home
    A jarring realism comes both from Mr. Oliver’s script and the performances by an ensemble of brilliant character actors.
  88. Nuclear Nation
    This modest film observes evacuees from Futaba, a small town near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, making do in their temporary shelter. Partly because this version of the movie was drastically edited to 96 minutes from 145, it feels sketchy and disjointed.
  89. Personal Tailor
    Messy in parts and at least 15 minutes too long, Personal Tailor is also cunningly acted and lushly photographed (by Zhao Xiaoshi) in dazzling candy-bright colors.
  90. Enemies Closer
    With a manic performance by Jean-Claude Van Damme and an improbable but intriguing plot variation, Enemies Closer is an improvement over most hunt-or-be-hunted fare. A small improvement, but still.
  91. Shored Up
    The problems are clearly explained, though the film doesn’t have solutions any more than public officials do, since shoreline development is already a fact of life.
  92. Cesar Chavez
    What the film struggles to depict, committed as it is to the conventions of hagiography, is the long and complex work of organizing people to defend their own interests. You are invited to admire what Cesar Chavez did, but it may be more vital to understand how he did it.
  93. St. Vincent
    The actors don’t do all the heavy lifting by themselves. The uniformly good performances make it clear that Mr. Melfi knows how to handle actors, and there are some funny bits.
  94. All the Way Through Evening
    More reminiscent of public television than of cinema, this rather humbly wrought movie makes no claim to being comprehensive in recalling a scary time.
  95. Tracks
    As it turns out, nothing else in Tracks matches the dramatic pow of a camel being relieved of his testes. Despite the otherworldly scenery and some predictable tragedy — Robyn can be maddeningly careless about the welfare of her animals — this proves to be a rather logy amble.
  96. Revolution
    Trying to gather too much into his net, Mr. Stewart gets a little lost, but his bottom line could not be clearer: When the oceans die, so do we.
  97. Life of a King
    Mr. Gooding’s performance and his complex charisma are fascinating to watch throughout.
  98. Nymphomaniac: Volume II
    The problem with Nymphomaniac: Volume II lies not in its display of erect penises and reddened buttocks, but rather in its dull narrative and overworked ideas.
  99. Nightcrawler
    Nightcrawler is a slick and shallow movie desperate, like Lou himself, to be something more.
  100. Miss Julie
    Aside from the change of setting, Ms. Ullmann’s version is quite orthodox. Much more convincing than Mike Figgis’s 1999 screen adaptation, starring Saffron Burrows, it is a grueling slog through a hell of torment, cruelty and suffering.
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