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. Silent Souls
    Silent Souls is part folk tale, part lesson in letting go. In its quiet acceptance of the passing of time, this unusual film reminds us that to die is not always the same as to disappear.
  2. Back Door Channels: The Price of Peace
    A well-reported history of the Camp David talks, the events that led to them, and the difficult negotiations that followed to forge the peace treaty that was signed the next spring.
  3. Sound It Out
    Like a mint pressing in a bargain bin Sound It Out is a rare find. Sweet.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jane's Journey
    Skimps on intellectual substance but skirts by on the lightly likable charm of its subject.
  5. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    A dandy little documentary whether you view the story it captures as a precursor to the flash fame of the Internet age or as one of the last genuine underground phenomena before the Internet made that whole concept obsolete.
  6. Prince of Swine
    A film with nothing to please the eye and even less to excite the mind.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Weird World of Blowfly
    Somehow Mr. Reid has an ability to push so far into the depths of stupidity that he breaks out the other side, making you laugh in spite of yourself.
  8. Berlin 36
    Tasteful to a fault, Berlin 36 turns real-life controversy into disappointingly tepid drama.
  9. 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.
  10. 3
    In this quintessentially Germanic film, Berlin - where they live, work, and create and voraciously consume culture - is as much a character as any person. The collective sensibility on display is determinedly forward looking; you might even say avant-garde.
  11. Restless
    It is hard to say, though, if this film, directed by Gus Van Sant from a script by Jason Lew, is an argument for denial or a treatise on acceptance. Curiously, and in a way that is sometimes touching and sometimes icky, it does not seem to perceive much of a difference.
  12. I Don't Know How She Does It
    If Kate's hyperkinetic cheer and shrill self-absorption are Carrie trademarks, 13 years after "Sex and the City" first appeared on television, their appeal has all but evaporated. I Don't Know How She Does It seems stuck in the past.
  13. Straw Dogs
    Mr. Lurie's movie does not quite succeed on its own, though it is pulpy and brutal and at times grotesquely comical. The story does not cohere, and the performances are uneven. But as a piece of film criticism - as a conversation with, and interpretation of, an earlier film - it is intriguing.
  14. Drive
    The virtuosity on display is also the director's, of course, and that, for better and for worse, is pretty much the point of Drive, the coolest movie around and therefore the latest proof that cool is never cool enough.
  15. Position Among the Stars
    Engrossing, poetic and often very funny, "Position," like its predecessors, uses the lens of a single family to view the tumult of an entire country.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Granito: How to Nail a Dictator
    Ms. Yates's moral convictions and agitprop idealizations come far too easily. Granito is less rough-edged than its guerrilla-film predecessor, but it shares a spirit of simplistic revolutionary solidarity.
  17. The Mill and the Cross
    In this lush and hypnotic examination of a painter's work and the times in which he lived, Mr. Majewski presents an extended contemplation of the creative process itself.
  18. Creature
    The six actors in the central, edible roles seem as if they could have pulled off a "Scream"-like satire, but since they weren't asked to, there's nothing much for them to do but follow the clearly visible paths to their doom.
  19. Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star
    This may be the worst movie Pauly Shore has ever been in. Think about that.
  20. Where Soldiers Come From
    Where Soldiers Come From is, more than anything, a commentary on class. In its compassionate, modest gaze, the real cost of distant political decisions is softly illuminated, as well as the shame of a country with little to offer its less fortunate young people than a ticket to a battlefield.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football
    Fordson, however, does not condemn the United States. It rather proudly affirms the American dream, reclaiming it for Muslims who see no conflict between their patriotism and their faith.
  22. The Inheritors
    His film opens with a lullaby, and while there is indeed something soothing in his images of repetitive, backbreaking toil, the music also serves as a reminder of childhood lost.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Kingdom
    Though its reverence for Peking Opera gives the film a thinly heritage sheen, its generic mix of backstage musical and swordplay spectacular is vintage discount bin.
  24. Shaolin
    If the movie feels old-school (with new-school production values), consider its pedigree. It's no wonder: Shaolin is a reimagining of the 1982 "Shaolin Temple," in which Jet Li made his debut.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The High Cost of Living
    This debut feature by the Canadian director Deborah Chow is so artistically well-intentioned and earnest in its ambitions that you can almost forgive the banality of its every scene.
  26. Burke and Hare
    Those who care less about such stuff than about being entertained will find plenty to like in this ghoulish comedy, a droll take on one of the most notorious mass-murder cases of the 19th century.
  27. Laugh at My Pain
    Some of Kevin Hart's fans may be disappointed that Laugh at My Pain, a film version of his recent stand-up tour, offers less than an hour of Mr. Hart onstage. But a couple of adornments - one before the concert footage, one after - flesh out this funny, profanity-heavy movie nicely.
  28. Love in Space
    As domestic summer date movies ("A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"; "The Change-Up") compete for snark and gross-out points, it's a relief to know that the traditional frothy rom-com - sweet-hearted and hopeful, without profanity or sexual gymnastics - is not dead. Outsourced? That's another story.
  29. Tanner Hall
    An uneven drama set at a girls' boarding school, rarely rises above the generic, though its atmosphere of coddled young people indulging themselves in opulent surroundings is palpably authentic.
  30. Bobby Fischer Against the World
    Bobby Fischer Against the World does not traffic in easy explanations or medical diagnoses, but it leaves the strong impression of a continuity between the oddness Fischer displayed in early interviews and the mania so jarringly evident toward the end.
  31. Inside Out
    If Paul Levesque, the professional wrestler better known as Triple H, hopes to follow the career path of, say, Dwayne Johnson, who is now a credible action-adventure leading man, he's going to need movies a lot better than Inside Out to do it.
  32. Brother's Justice
    The career of the actor Dax Shepard hasn't skyrocketed, but neither has it sputtered...Brother's Justice, his flailing, ultralow-budget directorial debut, will not accelerate his professional trajectory.
  33. Grave Encounters
    As the uniformly annoying characters stumble around, screaming and cursing, we don't give a hoot for their survival. Quite the reverse: we're counting the minutes until the asylum's ghostly inhabitants silence them for good.
  34. Echotone
    The realities in Nathan Christ's impressive documentary Echotone are, sadly, nothing new. But the emotions surrounding them are nevertheless compelling.
  35. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
    In many respects Ceausescu turns out to be as much the author of this brilliant documentary as the director, Andrei Ujica, who waded through more than 1,000 hours of filmed state propaganda, official news reports and home movies to create a cinematic tour de force that tracks the rise, reign and grim fall of its subject.
  36. Beware the Gonzo
    Its serious intentions notwithstanding, Beware the Gonzo is essentially a comedy with a mean streak; its portrait of the big man on campus is truly venomous.
  37. We Were Here
    Throughout We Were Here there is not a hint of mawkishness, self-pity or self-congratulation. The humility, wisdom and cumulative sorrow expressed lend the film a glow of spirituality and infuse it with grace.
  38. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    The fact that the speakers' faces are never seen produces a feeling of estrangement that is crucial to the film's effectiveness. You become acutely aware of gaps and discontinuities: between slogans and realities, between political ideals and stubborn social problems, between then and now.
  39. Contagion
    Soderbergh's smart, spooky thriller about a thicket of contemporary plagues - a killer virus, rampaging fear, an unscrupulous blogger - is as ruthlessly effective as the malady at its cool, cool center.
  40. Warrior
    It is appropriately blunt, powerful and relentless, a study of male bodies in sweaty motion and masculine emotions in teary turmoil.
  41. Apollo 18
    A drab combination of science-fiction horror film and conspiracy thriller, accomplishes something the world wasn't really crying out for: it recreates the tedium of watching the later Apollo missions.
  42. Shark Night 3D
    The result is a movie that isn't crummy, exactly, just blah: when the freakiest teeth on screen belong not to one of Walt Conti's animatronically realized sharks but to a good-ol'-boy called Red, you know you have a problem.
  43. 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.
  44. Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
    Though their quarry eventually appears to be a model of paranoia and prejudice, it's the thrill of the hunt that keeps Resurrect Dead compelling.
  45. Love Exposure
    Merging the sacred and the profane, the bloody and the batty, Love Exposure tunnels into serious topics - warped parenting, sexual intolerance and the way religious cults enslave damaged souls - with a hilariously blasphemous shovel.
  46. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    Witty but not campy, grand without being unduly somber, it is a crazy, almost-coherent riot of intrigue, color and kineticism anchored by the charisma of its cast.
  47. Seven Days in Utopia
    A stultifying hybrid of athletic instruction film and Christian sermon.
  48. Love Crime
    It is interesting and ingenious, even if some of the kinky, queasy fascination that had been so intoxicating in the earlier scenes ebbs away.
  49. I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive
    I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive is anything but the clichéd fantasy of a blissful mother-child reunion. Although there are hints of joy once they reconnect, the wounds are too deep, and the characters too complex.
  50. 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."
  51. 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.
  52. Bodyguard
    Mr. Khan, seasoned Bollywood beefcake, is a well-muscled hunk who doesn't take himself too seriously in fight scenes. If only the film's archly slick director, Siddique, had adopted the same winking attitude toward the romantic arc. A twist near the end sends this contrived movie into a maudlin stratosphere from which it doesn't recover.
  53. Rebirth
    Stands as both a tribute and a study in healing.
  54. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    The puppets and the music make Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life engaging, but it is also visually hectic and lacks either the dramatic intensity or the arresting insight that might have lifted it out of the pedestrian realm of the admiring biopic.
  55. The Debt
    As The Debt grows more complex and suspenseful, it also becomes more literal, losing some of its dramatic intensity.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Stripped Down
    The onslaught of optical effects and deafeningly expressive foley suggest a voyage through a pinball machine piloted by the director Tony Scott.
  57. 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.
  58. Chasing Madoff
    The film is frustratingly uneven in its presentation.
  59. Colombiana
    The overall effect is distancing; there are some early comic moments that have you laughing along with the movie, but eventually the clashing tones and preposterousness just have you laughing.
  60. Our Idiot Brother
    A thin, unconvincing movie made likable by the charm and skill of its cast and by a script peppered with wit and insight.
  61. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    None of Mr. del Toro's classy fiddling, however, can improve on the original's marvelously economical scares. But if you've always wondered what the tooth fairies want with all those teeth - or if you just need proof that a terrified Katie Holmes looks not that different from the everyday version - this is the movie for you.
  62. Tales from the Golden Age
    The strongest tales embrace a strain of barnyard humor that is matched by the robust performances of actors who convey an earthy jocularity. The movie doesn't shy away from comparing these hardy, weather-beaten rustics to their livestock.
  63. Special Treatment
    A story that should have been a taut poker-faced French farce that pushed its premise to the brink of absurdity stalls, unsure of its balance between comedy and drama. The movie's one reliable constant is Ms. Huppert. You can't take your eyes off her, even when she is misused and misdirected.
  64. The Family Tree
    The only reason I can think of to watch Vivi Friedman's flat, satirical farce The Family Tree - and it's not a good enough reason - is the opportunity to play a game of spot the semi-star.
  65. Circumstance
    Though it lacks the artful, headlong immediacy of "The Circle" and "Offside," Jafar Panahi's films about women in Tehran - and the breakneck exuberance of Bahman Ghobadi's "No One Knows About Persian Cats," about Tehran's underground music scene - Circumstance ripples with the indignant energy of youthful rebellion.
  66. Brighton Rock
    By discarding most of the theological debate, the movie is no longer a passion play but a gritty and despairing noir. That's good enough for me.
  67. Higher Ground
    There is something remarkable - you might even say miraculous - about the way Higher Ground makes its gentle, thoughtful way across the burned-over terrain of the American culture wars.
  68. Iron Crows
    A startlingly beautiful documentary by Bong-Nam Park that is also devastatingly sad.
  69. 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy
    Sex in this film looks so nonecstatic that a better title might have been "3D Sex and Zen: Zero Child Policy."
  70. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World
    The fall-off in sexiness, soulfulness and wittiness from Ms. Gugino and Antonio Banderas, the parents in the first three "Spy Kids" films, to Ms. Alba and Joel McHale is whiplash steep.
  71. Flypaper
    Full of indie mannerisms - compulsive swearing, jokey violence, quirk-laden characters - Flypaper can't quite manage to find a style or a comic groove of its own.
  72. Programming the Nation?
    Fusty research, aging interviewees and decades-old advertising campaigns offer background to the uninitiated, but Mr. Warrick's muddled, undisciplined approach destroys even the possibility of a cogent overview.
  73. A Horrible Way to Die
    Viewed simply as a horror movie, A Horrible Way to Die is diverting; viewed as commentary on our willingness to tune out evil for the sake of emotional connection, it's devastating.
  74. The Last Circus
    Brilliant, bizarre, dazzling and utterly demented, The Last Circus views Franco-era Spain through the crazed eyes of two clowns doing battle for the love of one magnificent woman.
  75. Mozart's Sister
    Nannerl, the subject of at least three novels also titled "Mozart's Sister," is in this film meant to be something more than a chapter in her brother's biography though it's not exactly clear what. Somewhat frustratingly if reasonably, Mr. Féret never settles on whether she was a genius, a martyr, a feminist cause, a disappointed daughter, a resigned woman or all of the above.
  76. The Journals of Musan
    Mr. Park's screenplay, pedestrian direction and stolid performance don't set us up to care.
  77. The Hedgehog
    At times The Hedgehog suggests a Gallic "Harold and Maude," with an intellectual gloss as it celebrates the life force passed from an older generation to a younger. But its concept of vitality isn't the popular cliché of kicking up your heels, breathing deeply and gorging on ice cream. It is an aesthete's ideal of pursuing moments of ecstatic perfection in art and companionship.
  78. Griff the Invisible
    Mr. Kwanten, meanwhile, best known for playing the sweet, dim Jason Stackhouse on the HBO show "True Blood," gives Griff the delicate, ethereal affect of a man who's an alien in his own world except when he's running down an alley in a disguise. He's a pleasure to watch.
  79. 5 Days of War
    The movie is a continuous barrage of explosions, sneak attacks, chases, life-and-death face-offs, and amazing rescues that are as far-fetched as they are exhilarating. The cheap thrills are compounded by Mikko Alanne and David Battle's screenplay, a wallow in old-time Hollywood boilerplate, some of which you can't believe is being recycled yet again.
  80. Fright Night
    The old "Fright Night" was both self-aware and effectively scary, and if this one seems to prefer gruesome digital effects to old-fashioned bump-in-the-night spookiness, it still succeeds in keeping the audience both tickled and anxious.
  81. Conan the Barbarian
    Mr. Momoa has some awfully big biceps to fill. He rises to that task with a pumped physique made for ogling. Thankfully, he also shows glints of self-awareness that can make hypermasculine blowouts like these more watchable and were largely missing from Mr. Schwarzenegger's wide-eyed turn in the first "Conan the Barbarian" (1982).
  82. Amigo
    Amigo is a well-carpentered narrative, fast-moving and emphatic, stepping nimbly from gravity to good humor.
  83. One Day
    Her (Ms. Scherfig) eccentric eye and offbeat rhythm sustain One Day through its stretches of banality and mitigate some of its flaws.
  84. Summer Pasture
    For all the hardship they endure, this intimate dual portrait, directed by Lynn True and Nelson Walker, with Tsering Perlo, suggests that their lives are neither more nor less fulfilled than those of any highly stressed upper-middle-class Americans.
  85. Bad Posture
    Mr. Murray creates a beguiling, visually rich canvas.
  86. Littlerock
    It's significantly smaller and more casual than "Mystery Train" or "Lost in Translation," movies its premise calls to mind, but in some ways it's more layered and complex.
  87. Final Destination 5
    A new wrinkle in how the killings spool out actually makes the film even more predictable, and the deaths, which tend to be squirmy rather than explosive, are so perfunctory and lazily jokey that they leave a decidedly bad aftertaste.
  88. Aarakshan
    Subtle it ain't and subtle it needn't be. It is, though, mostly involving (if Bollywood long, at 2 hours 45 minutes) and even occasionally stirring.
  89. Damn!
    Mr. Fisher-Cohen captures Mr. McMillan's transformation from a guy with a funny look and line into someone who believes his own hype and misconstrues his Warholian 15 minutes for widespread popularity and influence. It's a dismaying portrait and, here in the YouTube age, a direct hit.
  90. Scheherazade Tell Me a Story
    Lively, swift, vibrantly colorful and for the most part wonderfully acted, the film is slyly aware of the daytime talk show as a vehicle for women's concerns.
  91. Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
    There is a paradox at the heart of the film. It strains to celebrate diversity and individualism, while its processed music exemplifies strict corporate teamwork.
  92. 30 Minutes or Less
    If you tune out the dialogue, which is packed with raunch that has neither rhyme nor story reason, there are passable moments. The interludes of Nick shifting gears as he tries to beat the clock on another pizza run are nicely managed and say something about a character whose talent behind the wheel is a kind of grace note.
  93. Senna
    As a personality profile, Senna is sketchy at best. Born into a well-to-do family in São Paulo, Brazil, Senna pursued the sport from a young age with a maniacal zeal. He comes across as a fatalistic daredevil and as a man of the people, his wealthy background aside.
  94. 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.
  95. 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.
  96. The Harvest/La Cosecha
    The Harvest, in its modest way, calls to mind "The Grapes of Wrath" but with no glimmer of a New Deal or a union, or even of better economic times ahead.
  97. Habermann
    The depictions of cosmopolitan Germans and mostly avaricious, bestial Czechs are likely to stir strong emotions among some viewers, but over all Habermann is more potboiler than political or historical statement.
  98. Protektor
    Dipping in and out of luminous black and white, Protektor has a distancing glamour that prevents the story from digging in. Burdened by a central relationship so lacking in passion that its fate becomes negligible, the film's narrative feels trivialized by jaunty musical fragments and repetitive cycling and rowing motifs that belabor Emil's metaphorical treadmill of appeasement.
  99. The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll
    An exhausted pileup of rock-movie clichés, The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll presents artistic self-destruction with the solemnity of a movie that has invented a spanking-new genre.
  100. Cold Fish
    A deliciously warped wallow in misogyny, depravity and dead-eyed manipulation, Cold Fish charts the twisted alliance of two tropical-fish salesmen with baleful glee.
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