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. Gun Hill Road
    A strangely bifurcated film, Gun Hill Road comes to life only when focused on Michael, and Ms. Santana (who was just beginning her own gender transition when she won the role) holds the screen like a pro.
  2. 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.
  3. Mysteries of Lisbon
    Made for European television and originally divided into six one-hour episodes, the movie now runs an absorbing, astonishingly fast four and a quarter hours.
  4. The Change-Up
    The body-swapping premise, which is stale to begin with, isn't explored with any depth, unless you find meaningful Freudian subtext in the movie's relentless anal fixation. But the premise at least sets up a farce that surpasses "The Hangover" in gleeful crudeness and profanity.
  5. Bellflower
    There's more here than initially meets and sometimes assaults the eye, including the hyperbolic dudeness of it all.
  6. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    It's good, canny-dumb fun.
  7. Magic Trip
    Magic Trip is the cinematic equivalent of a yellowed scrapbook whose pictures are accompanied by sketchy captions created after the fact.
  8. The Mouth of the Wolf
    The Mouth of the Wolf will haunt you.
  9. Good Neighbors
    Swerving from bland to brutal, endearingly coy to shockingly explicit, the Canadian import Good Neighbors finds pitch-black comedy among white-bread lives.
  10. All She Can
    Worse, you never root for Ms. Calderon's Luz, who goes from sullen to more sullen to a bit less sullen. She has discipline - to lift, she has to keep her weight down and train constantly - but not much compassion and no joy.
  11. House of Boys
    A gay tragedy in three acts and more than a dozen excellent songs, House of Boys conveys an emotional honesty that overrides its dated style.
  12. Golf in the Kingdom
    Everyone spouts nicely turned baloney elevating golf to the level of a religious experience, which grows tedious fairly quickly. The film almost works, though, if you view the whole thing as a very, very dry comedy.
  13. Sleep Furiously
    Intermittently absorbing, if deliberately stripped of drama.
  14. The Optimists
    It would be comforting to imagine that The Optimists, Goran Paskaljevic's viciously funny gloss of Voltaire's "Candide," was a site-specific satire of this Serbian director's homeland in the post-Milosevic era.
  15. Life in a Day
    It's a hard movie to engage with or even sit through, despite the fact that much of the material is interesting in its own right. Oddly, but perhaps predictably, the problem is the resolutely conventional and soft-headed way in which that material has been assembled.
  16. Point Blank
    I can't recall another thriller that has maintained this kind of velocity without going kablooey and losing its train of thought.
  17. Attack the Block
    This fabulously inventive debut feature, written and directed by the British comedian Joe Cornish, never flags.
  18. The Smurfs
    Sure, Smurfs are blue, but who knew that they actually work blue?
  19. The Guard
    There's a story, in case you're looking for one, though it's almost an afterthought, just the thin glue holding everything together, including the fine cast, the sense of broody place and the fatalism that seems to come with it. Mostly there's Mr. McDonagh's playful, sometimes overly cute language, which serves the actors and also threatens to upstage them.
  20. 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.
  21. Crazy, Stupid, Love
    The movie, true to its own PG-13 rating, opts for mildness, modesty and chastened optimism. At the same time, though, it seems to know that a crueler, more cynical rendering of its story - a "Bitter, Hopeless, Love" - lurks between the lines.
  22. True Adolescents
    True Adolescents, like most indie movies related to the mumblecore school, is a delicate piece of machinery. Its truth lies in the tiniest details: the pauses, the stricken looks, the false bravado, the pathetically redundant slang (so many "dudes").
  23. The Interrupters
    The stories in The Interrupters, a hard wallop of a documentary, may weigh heavily on your heart and head, but they will also probably infuriate you.
  24. The Future
    The magical, metaphorical strain in The Future is what makes it powerful, unsettling and strange, as well as charming. The everyday fears and frustrations that shadow us on our awkward trip through the life cycle often feel enormous, even cosmic, and Ms. July has the audacity to find images and situations that give form to those metaphysical inklings.
  25. Cowboys & Aliens
    Favreau wavers uncertainly between goofy pastiche and seriousness in a movie that wastes its title and misses the opportunity to play with, you know, ideas about the western and science-fiction horror.
  26. El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
    Anyone looking for the lowdown on haute cuisine will be sorely disappointed: devoid of emotion, context or narrative, the baffling avant-garde techniques and extreme politesse of the lab become oppressively dull.
  27. 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.
  28. Fire in Babylon
    It all adds up to an entertaining 88 minutes, despite the film's ramshackle construction and its once-over-lightly approach to political, cultural and athletic history.
  29. 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.
  30. Another Earth
    A coming-of-adulthood story that improbably blends a plaintive drama with romantic longing and far-out science fiction.
  31. Autoerotic
    Its tone is quietly comical, with each chapter treated as an extended joke, or as an R-rated O. Henry story angling toward a neat concluding twist.
  32. Sarah's Key
    Undone by its very premise: that the two stories it tells can coexist in the same film.
  33. The Myth of the American Sleepover
    What Mr. Mitchell gets splendidly right in this quiet, observant film, is the unsteady mixture of sophistication and naïveté that is central to the modern American teenage way of being in the world.
  34. Captain America: The First Avenger
    Has a winningly pulpy, jaunty, earnest spirit.
  35. Friends with Benefits
    The results are about as naughty as that sounds (not very), but it also makes for a fairly giggling good time.
  36. The Woman with the 5 Elephants
    It's an interesting story, well told, though Mr. Jendreyko overworks some documentary fallbacks: gnarled fingers, the view from a moving train.
  37. Impolex
    Mr. Perry, a New York University graduate whose second feature, "The Color Wheel," provoked passion and puzzlement at several festivals, has a natural eye, an offbeat sense of rhythm and no great interest in conventional storytelling. This is both intriguing and a bit tiresome, as Tyrone stumbles and mumbles his way through a series of inscrutable encounters.
  38. Hood to Coast
    Christoph Baaden, the director, loses sight of the fact that, for people who don't run, the cult of running is kind of boring.
  39. Girlfriend
    The overall mildness and inconsequence of Girlfriend is disrupted for a while by Amanda Plummer, who gives a vivid yet gentle performance in a small part as Evan's patient, protective mother.
  40. The Tree
    The movie is truly a tree-hugger's delight (I confess to being one such hugger) that makes the most of its metaphors without straining toward supernatural schmaltz.
  41. Lucky
    Pitching uncertainly between cute and creepy, engaging and weird, this farcical story draws energy from a wickedly eccentric Ann-Margret, having a high old time as Ben's doting mother.
  42. Daylight
    Not one for climactic endings or predictable histrionics, the director, David Barker (who wrote the script with Ms. Meierhans and Mr. Godere), sticks to the stylistic template of his debut feature, "Afraid of Everything," which was filmed in 1999. Preferring the tease over the tell, his films coax us into looking beneath the surface. What we find is mostly up to us.
  43. The Chameleon
    Ms. Barkin is almost unrecognizable as this bedraggled bundle of rage and disappointment. Exploding from deep within, her devastating performance hijacks the film.
  44. Winnie the Pooh
    It is comfortable with itself and confident in its ability to amuse and beguile young viewers.
  45. Tabloid
    The sheer heterogeneity of human experience is one of his (Morris) enduring preoccupations, and he has found, once again, an impossible and perfect embodiment of just how curious our species can be.
  46. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
    There are enough decent moments in "Snow Flower" that you can at times see the remains of a better movie amid the jolting transitions between past and present, but these eras never really speak to each other, much less to you.
  47. Life, Above All
    A grave and quietly moving story about a South African girl of extraordinary character, does something that few painful dramas accomplish: It tells a tale of resilience without platitudes about the triumph of the human spirit or without false promises about an unclouded future.
  48. Salvation Boulevard
    As the plot swerves toward an almost crazy conclusion, there is the inkling of a strong, interesting idea here, about how some versions of modern religion are predicated on the systematic denial of reality, but Salvation Boulevard is itself too loosely tethered to the actual world to make the point with the necessary vigor or acuity.
  49. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    Childhood ends, this time forever, with tears and howls, swirls of smoke, the shock of mortality and bittersweet smiles in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the grave, deeply satisfying final movie in the series.
  50. Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
    The actor Michael Rapaport (Brad Pitt's roommate in "True Romance"), in his feature directorial debut, does an admirable job recounting the group's formation and dissecting its dissolution.
  51. Farmageddon
    Nonetheless, the film's homespun quality (Ms. Canty, whose childlike voice provides intermittent narration, simply describes herself in the publicity notes as "the mom of four kids") works in its favor, as does its maker's agitated sincerity.
  52. Fading of the Cries
    "How are we going to get out of here?" Sarah squawks at one point, a question that Mr. Dourif ought to have asked his agent long before the cameras began to roll.
  53. Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish
    Sprawling and sometimes confusing, but its premise is charming and not at all far-fetched.
  54. Summer of Goliath
    Carrying far more weight than their screen time would warrant, the "interviews" with actors playing young children are the best part of the film.
  55. Zookeeper
    It's hard to completely dislike a movie in which Mr. James makes like Fay Wray, hitching a ride on the back of his gorilla pal, Bernie (voiced by Nick Nolte), as Bernie clambers up a bridge.
  56. The Ward
    Quaintly old-fashioned in style, plot and special effects, this familiar tale of female derangement and institutional abuse is too tame to scare and too shallow to engage.
  57. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    It is a rich, beautifully organized and illustrated modern history of Eastern European Jewry examined through the life and work of the author, born Sholem Rabinovich in Pereyaslav (near Kiev) in 1859.
  58. The Ledge
    The Ledge, it should be noted, is not dumb. What undoes it is its mechanical structure: a stale dramatic formula of the sort taught in elementary playwriting classes.
  59. Ironclad
    Ironclad alternately feels, plays and sounds like an abridged television mini-series and a feature-length video game.
  60. Project Nim
    There is no doubt that Nim was exploited, and also no doubt that he was loved. Mr. Marsh, by allowing those closest to Nim plenty of room to explain themselves, examines the moral complexity of this story without didacticism. He allows the viewer, alternately appalled, touched and fascinated, to be snagged on some of its ethical thorns.
  61. The Sleeping Beauty
    The pleasures of Ms. Breillat's work are its commitment and seriousness and its raw, sometimes very funny perversity: she's lets everything hang out, without apologies.
  62. Septien
    A lackadaisical dive into backwoods barminess and masculine neuroses, this low-budget paean to indoor plumbing and rampant facial hair doesn't unfold so much as unravel.
  63. Rapt
    A solid yet fleet French thriller about a society kidnapping and its shockwaves.
  64. Flying Fish
    The intertwining of the narratives, along with the somewhat elliptical, or perhaps rudimentary, storytelling, makes for a confusing experience. But the stories are mainly an excuse for pretty pictures, some quite striking, of poverty and oppression, and for a closing frenzy of bloodletting.
  65. Horrible Bosses
    The laughter is mean but also oddly pure: it expels shame and leaves you feeling dizzy, a little embarrassed and also exhilarated, kind of like the cocaine that two of the main characters consume by accident.
  66. Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema
    Between Mr. Ziman's music-video skills and his close approximation of the kinetic style of Michael Mann (a scene from Mr. Mann's "Heat" has a key role in the plot), it's easy to overlook the formulas and just enjoy the ride.
  67. Welcome
    Compelling, finely balanced immigration drama.
  68. Love Etc.
    That things tend not to end, or bode, well doesn't detract from the overall Hallmark vibe.
  69. Delhi Belly
    It also shows, perceptively and often sweetly, a broader slice of young, urban, educated life in India as the three deal with careers, love and happiness.
  70. Crime After Crime
    Recording every success and setback, the wrenching documentary Crime After Crime favors the personal over the political, creating a no-frills portrait of a stoic and remarkably unembittered woman.
  71. Small Town Murder Songs
    Compellingly acted from top to bottom. As the raw passions of its hard-bitten characters seep into you, the songs hammer them even more deeply into your consciousness. The film's only flaw - a big one - is its brevity.
  72. The Perfect Host
    Like Warwick himself, the movie begins to run amok after a taut and tantalizing first act. Not even Mr. Hyde Pierce's best efforts can make sense of a character who by the end of the film seems to be a completely different person with the same name.
  73. Terri
    What lifts Terri above its peers is not the plight of its protagonist or the film's sympathy for him, but rather the care and craft that the director, Azazel Jacobs, has brought to fairly conventional material.
  74. Monte Carlo
    Cheery, corny and perhaps calculatingly unoriginal, this is packaged entertainment so familiar it feels like a remake and so wholesome you could swear Sandra Dee starred in the 1959 original. Think of it as "No Sex and the City" for tweeners.
  75. Larry Crowne
    A rom-com fairy tale so tepid and well behaved that watching it feels like being stuck in traffic as giddy joy-riders in the opposite lane break the speed limit. You have little choice but to cool your heels and pretend that the parched crabgrass in the median is a field of flowers.
  76. 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.
  77. Aurora
    A quiet, steady burn filled with stretches of unsettlingly reverberant silence cleaved in half by a midpoint eruption of violence. Here there is before, and then there is after.
  78. Double Dhamaal
    Unless your idea of a good joke is a golf ball thwacked into an unsuspecting crotch or the old frying-pan-in-the-kisser gag, you probably won't like this movie.
  79. 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.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Vincent Wants to Sea
    The principal characters can be reduced to a handful of tics, and the entire story line is immaculately devoid of incidental detail. It's like sitting in a padded cell for about 90 minutes.
  81. The Best and the Brightest
    If you are going to be this mean-spirited, you had better deliver the jokes, but the film's attacks on pretentious parents - not to mention put-downs of hardworking immigrants - consistently come off as more hateful than humorous.
  82. Beginning of the Great Revival
    It demonstrates that mainstream Chinese cinema can be as guilty of self-indulgent overstatement as anything out of the West.
  83. General Orders No. 9
    Yet the urban images he presents are missing the thing that makes any city come alive: human beings. You begin to suspect that Mr. Persons hates humanity. This makes General Orders No. 9, for all its sheen of sophistication, rather simplistic: people bad, nature good.
  84. Leap Year
    Making sadomasochism appear less erotic than stamp collecting, Leap Year is a slow flare of emotional agony.
  85. A Love Affair of Sorts
    The real problem here, though, is that noting the it's-all-about-me nature of modern life already feels like a point that no longer needs making. Yeah, we're self-absorbed and shallow; so what else is new?
  86. Raw Faith
    Despite these flaws, it's refreshing to see a documentary about a normal grown-up who is struggling with problems of life and love, just as so many invisible others do.
  87. Turtle: The Incredible Journey
    The loggerhead turtle is a threatened species, and one day all we may have left are its computer-generated analogues. Its fight for existence is plenty dramatic already, and is a story worth telling honestly.
  88. The Names of Love
    For all the potentially dangerous subjects it glosses, above all the tangled legacies of the Holocaust and the Algerian war, The Names of Love dances away from any uncomfortable provocation. Even when sticking out its tongue, it is finally just an airy comedy riding on one cheeky, incandescent performance.
  89. 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.
  90. A Better Life
    As is sometimes the case with movies that take on civil and political rights without force-feeding the audience,A Better Life" plays the human interest angle hard. It tries to put a lump in your throat and a tear on your cheek (it succeeds), pumping your emotions doubtless in an attempt to look nonpartisan.
  91. Cars 2
    It is not entirely without charm or wit. Directed by John Lasseter (with Brad Lewis credited as co-director) from a script by Ben Queen, Cars 2 lavishes scrupulous imaginative attention on its cosmopolitan settings.
  92. 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.
  93. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
    The film's sobriety and carefully balanced arguments make it an exemplary piece of reporting, although its emotional heat rarely rises to a boil.
  94. Passione
    While Passione praises the spirit of its subjects, it also attends to the discipline and tenacity that makes them worth noticing.
  95. Angel of Evil
    Angel of Evil is bloody, yes, but loaded with generic action sequences, shouting matches and blustery sentiment. To borrow Robert Evans's famous quotation about "The Godfather," you can smell the spaghetti, but less sauce might have helped.
  96. Jig
    Jig begins light on its feet but soon becomes leaden. Legs pinwheel, and fake ringlets fly, but competitive tension is sacrificed to repetition and an unnecessary focus on complicated numerical scoring.
  97. Battle for Brooklyn
    A documentary about the unending mess that is the Atlantic Yards project, is unabashedly slanted and as a result will probably be dismissed by those it portrays unflatteringly. That's unfortunate, because this film should be discouraging and dismaying for people on all sides of the project, for what it says about oversize expectations and missed opportunities.
  98. Kidnapped
    Starting as a coldly realistic thriller, this film eventually loses its bearings as the director Miguel Ángel Vivas succumbs to a fit of nihilism, transforming Kidnapped into gruesome tit-for-tat torture porn.
  99. R
    Isn't as hellish as the situation behind bars is portrayed in American movies, some of which are so gory they qualify as prison porn. But it is awful enough.
  100. The Art of Getting By
    There is also much in The Art of Getting By that is worth praising, and if you can grade on a curve - setting the standard at "The Wackness" rather than "The Squid and the Whale" - you may find yourself touched, tickled and occasionally surprised.
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