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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    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
    The movie's main theme, no surprise, is the struggle of The Times to survive in the age of the Internet. But it does little to illuminate that struggle, preferring instead a constant parade of people telling the camera how dreadful it would be if The Times did not survive. True, of course, but boring to the point of irritation after five or six repetitions.
  2. Buck
    In some sense it was beauty that saved Mr. Brannaman, that of his conscience and that of horses, which, having been tied to humans long ago, became companions, workers and for some, as this lovely movie shows, saviors.
  3. Green Lantern
    Green Lantern is bad. This despite Mr. Reynolds's dazzling dentistry, hard-body physique and earnest efforts.
  4. Mr. Popper's Penguins
    There is nothing new here, but Mr. Waters, as he showed with the smarter and more daring "Mean Girls" and "Freaky Friday," knows how to keep things buzzing along.
  5. The Lips
    Woven throughout is a deeply rewarding recognition of the sustaining power of female companionship.
  6. Trollhunter
    One of the many pleasures of the Norwegian director André Ovredal's clever and engaging mock documentary Trollhunter is the way it plays with the idea of the supernatural rule book.
  7. Just Like Us
    A laudable if lightweight argument for broader minds and thicker skins.
  8. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
    Mr. Siegel is no Cassandra: retaining the waggish tone of his previous documentary, "The Real Dirt on Farmer John" (released in 2007), he balances the doom-talking heads with cute animation and characters like Yvon Achard, a French "bee historian" who caresses the swarm with his elaborately styled facial hair.
  9. Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer
    The whole film is a celebration of messy, colorful, vigorous creativity, echoed in Cynthia Charette's gloriously cluttered hodgepodge production design, with barely a product placement in sight.
  10. Viva Riva!
    Repackaging the revenge thriller in parakeet colors and distinctive African beats, the Congolese writer and director Djo Tunda Wa Munga gives Viva Riva! a playful sensuality that goes a long way toward disguising formula.
  11. Reversion
    The film does a pretty good job of conveying the bleakness and pointlessness Eva and her fellow mutants feel, but it's as if Ms. Trachinger were reluctant to take the premise any deeper for fear of being accused of imitating "Memento" or "Groundhog Day" or any number of other trapped-in-time films.
  12. Road to Nowhere
    If Mr. Hellman's movie only partly fulfills its promise as a gripping neo-noir mystery, his stylistic hallmarks lend it a singularly haunting atmosphere.
  13. Bride Flight
    Best enjoyed as a lavish period travelogue whose story is dwarfed by its panoramic overview.
  14. Agrarian Utopia
    The mood is not one of misery, but of quiet, weary endurance punctuated with moments of joy.
  15. The Trip
    As in many road movies, the trip becomes an occasion for philosophizing, a journey inward and out as the men joust and parry, improvising and entertaining each other, at times by imitating, hilariously, someone else (Michael Caine, Sean Connery).
  16. Super 8
    Like his (Abrams) previous features, "Mission: Impossible III" and "Star Trek," Super 8 is an enticing package without much inside.
  17. Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland
    It's also a pretty familiar story, and "Reindeer," despite Mr. Neuvonen's verve and Jani's charisma, can drag. Like a lot of addiction stories, it starts to mirror the monotony and self-absorption of the addict's life.
  18. One Lucky Elephant
    Animal people sometimes say the wackiest things, but here, alas, they never satisfyingly address the ethical questions of what it means to capture and keep wild animals. Happily, while this movie's head may not always be in the right place, its heart is.
  19. Empire of Silver
    This weirdly engaging tale of banking and bad behavior makes 19th-century China look uncomfortably like 21st-century America.
  20. Some Days Are Better Than Others
    As a meditation Some Days has its virtues - if you're in the market for a picture-postcard bummer - but it will leave your mellowed mind pretty quickly.
  21. Love, Wedding, Marriage
    A movie that feels like punishment for a crime you can't remember committing.
  22. Turkey Bowl
    A quirky offering by Kyle Smith that does nothing more or less than show a touch-football game among friends. "It's sort of interesting," you might find yourself saying, "but is it a film?"
  23. The Last Mountain
    If Mr. Haney sometimes struggles to find focus, he has no trouble locating heroes, including the doggedly energetic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a slew of stalwart locals and fearless outsiders. And the black heart of coal country - and, as the film shows, our national energy debate - has never seemed so in need of white knights.
  24. !Women Art Revolution
    These interviews form the backbone of !W.A.R., and like the film, they're passionate, contentious, funny, sincere, politically attuned.
  25. Mr. Nice
    An affable throwback to those guilt-free days when hippie drug dealers radiated the glamorous aura of avant-garde heroes risking prison to spread the doctrine of liberation through cannabis.
  26. Beautiful Boy
    A kind of apocalyptic 21st-century "Ordinary People," Beautiful Boy, directed by Shawn Ku from a screenplay he wrote with Michael Armbruster, is so high-mindedly determined to avoid sensationalism that it sidesteps critical dramatic content and sabotages its own ambitions.
  27. Film Socialisme
    In typical Godardian fashion the film manages to be both strident and elusive, argumentative and opaque.
  28. Submarine
    This is the kind of story, as Oliver himself would admit, that we have already seen dozens of times. But Mr. Ayoade's keen visual wit and clever, knowing touches keep it surprising and nimble, especially in the quick, lurching early scenes, which are startlingly funny.
  29. Rejoice and Shout
    Your religion or lack of one doesn't matter. At some point while watching the film, you may feel that music IS God, or if not, a close approximation of divinity.
  30. X-Men: First Class
    With its spy-on-spy globetrotting, old-fashioned villains, flirty but prematurely swinging minis and fan-boy bits (look for an eye-blink-fast tribute to "Basic Instinct" and a cameo from the cult actor Michael Ironside), the whole enterprise has an agreeable lightness, no small thing, given its rapidly moving parts.
  31. Beginners
    In wistful tone and mood, Beginners at times hazily evokes the films of Wong Kar-wai, including "Chungking Express," a different kind of memory piece.
  32. Spork
    As uplifting stories of tolerance and self-discovery go, Spork has a messy appeal, but it's no "Hairspray."
  33. We Are the Night
    A love triangle with fangs but no bite, the German import We Are the Night is mostly infatuated with its own stylish excesses.
  34. Puzzle
    Although Puzzle is a much smaller, less ambitious film without the ominous political subtext of Ms. Martel's masterwork, its story of a woman discovering her special gift and rejoicing in it has implications about sexual inequality in Argentina's middle class.
  35. Hello Lonesome
    Adam Reid's smart, poignant trilogy of interwoven vignettes, manages the considerable feat of creating six fully human characters who are quirky enough to transcend the stereotypes found in a typical indie film.
  36. United Red Army
    The stilted and awkward physical and vocal performances in combination with the visually flat cinematography bring to mind the look, sound and visual texture of American daytime soaps, an association that perversely makes the movie more and more watchable.
  37. Tied to a Chair
    Insulting several nationalities and most of the filmgoing public, Tied to a Chair lurches through acting atrocities, continuity glitches and narrative gaps with grating insouciance.
  38. The Abduction of Zack Butterfield
    A cringingly awkward tale of sexual predation and female lunacy.
  39. The Tree of Life
    With disarming sincerity and daunting formal sophistication The Tree of Life ponders some of the hardest and most persistent questions, the kind that leave adults speechless when children ask them.
  40. Tuesday, After Christmas
    The strength of Tuesday, After Christmas, Mr. Muntean's fourth feature, lies in its rigorous, artful and humane fidelity to quotidian circumstance.
  41. Kung Fu Panda 2
    Accomplishes the depressingly familiar mathematical trick of being both more and less than its predecessor.
  42. The Hangover Part II
    The funniest, most reckless moments in The Hangover Part II, the largely mirthless sequel to the 2009 hit "The Hangover," take place in the final credits.
  43. Life 2.0
    Whether you're predisposed to seeing Second Life as liberating or creepy, Life 2.0 would have been more interesting and original if it, like its subjects, had dwelled more in the virtual world, and if it had told us more about that world's mechanics and folkways.
  44. Cost of a Soul
    As one bloody encounter treads on the heels of the next, all that remains is a tiny indie undone by its own vicious ambitions.
  45. Lost Bohemia
    A sad and spirited elegy for the Carnegie Hall Studios, which for more than a century provided working, living and teaching space for all kinds of artists on the floors above the famous concert hall.
  46. Midnight in Paris
    It is marvelously romantic, even though - or precisely because - it acknowledges the disappointment that shadows every genuine expression of romanticism.
  47. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
    It is by far the least strange of all the "Pirates" episodes so far, with none of the cartoonish exuberance or creepy-crawly effects that made its predecessors intermittently delightful.
  48. Louder Than a Bomb
    The efforts to document the teams' creative processes aren't particularly successful - no camera can capture something that elusive - but the filmmakers do a fine job with the back stories of the featured poets.
  49. Go for It!
    Best of all, Go for It! speaks to working-class young women without ignoring issues like race, class tensions and domestic violence. It's never mawkish, even at its understated climax. Uplift with minimal fanfare? That's no small feat. Latin spice only helps.
  50. Priest
    It becomes clear pretty quickly that the only real thought in the movie has gone into the cowboy-gothic costumes and the computer-generated effects.
  51. Hey, Boo: Harper Lee and 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
    Eventually, though, Hey, Boo settles into a pleasant rhythm. It gives the fascinating history of how the book came to be.
  52. Skateland
    Though leaning too heavily on period tunes and the templates of Mr. Linklater and John Hughes (to whom the film is dedicated), Mr. Burns has a distinctly spacious style that gives female characters room to breathe.
  53. Make Believe
    The buildup to the actual competition is perfectly paced, with the film never tipping its hand as to the winner. And the championship has all the drama of a high-stakes sporting event: failure under pressure, unexpected triumph, gracious losers and winners both.
  54. Vacation!
    Filmed on Hatteras Island, N.C., Vacation! meanders like an endless summer's day; even its tragic conclusion feels incongruously fragile.
  55. How to Live Forever
    Mr. Wexler has found interesting people and useful, funny and sometimes crackpot-seeming information.
  56. True Legend
    After a stirring opening battle, however, the fights in True Legend become pretty routine. And beyond some lovely mountain scenery and a tiny cameo by a radiant Michelle Yeoh, there isn't much else to look at.
  57. Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
    Interviews with Martin Scorsese, Lauren Bacall, Kim Hunter and the film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Powell's widow, among others, are fascinating, though we learn almost nothing about Cardiff's personal life.
  58. The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls
    Merging old-fashioned comedy routines with up-to-the-minute politics - all of it enabled by fun-loving personalities and a gift for rousing original songs - the ladies emit a genuine warmth that reels audiences in.
  59. City of Life and Death
    City of Life and Death isn't cathartic: it offers no uplifting moments, just the immodest balm of art. The horrors it represents can be almost too difficult to watch, yet you keep watching because Mr. Lu makes the case that you must.
  60. Hesher
    You see, this character, who is given no back story, is Life with a capital L. He is the Forneys' guardian angel who rouses them out of their funk. Given the movie's U-turn into allegory, maybe he's supposed to be a punk Jesus. Not even Mr. Gordon-Levitt's unremittingly savage performance can begin to salvage such hokum.
  61. The Big Bang
    With its red lighting and Hades-like smoke and fog, the lurid look of The Big Bang suggests a tacky disco inferno. I have a mental picture of the film's creators, stoned out of their minds on who knows what, cackling crazily as they outline a movie that would have more appropriately been titled "The Big Goof."
  62. The First Grader
    This ambition - to provoke thought while tugging at heartstrings - makes The First Grader fascinating and frustrating in almost equal measure.
  63. L'amour fou
    To realize that you may have the world while still feeling as if you have nothing is to experience a closer encounter with the void than most of us are likely to have.
  64. Everything Must Go
    Unlike its beer-soaked protagonist, Everything Must Go remains dry, serving up its catharsis in wry, moderate doses and making the most of its modest, careful virtues. It is a sober movie, but also sad and satisfying.
  65. Bridesmaids
    The movie is smart about a lot of things, including the vital importance of female friendships. And it's nice to see so many actresses taking up space while making fun of something besides other women.
  66. Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story
    The film bounces around enjoyably, giving a history of the game, talking to people who love it and chronicling the 2009 Monopoly World Championships in Las Vegas.
  67. The Colors of the Mountain
    Mr. Arbeláez cites Iranian film as an influence, and it's evident in his movie's subdued lyricism and its focus on the boys, whose games and projects - they keep trying to rescue the ball - are treated with a sweetness that steers clear (mostly) of sentimentality.
  68. Lord Byron
    Against all reason, Byron's televangelist-led quest for clarity compels us to follow, the film's melting, naturalistic images softening the occasional scream of dialogue repeated beyond all necessity.
  69. Forks Over Knives
    While at times fascinating, this trudge through statistics, graphs and grainy film of cholesterol bubbles and arterial plaque may challenge even the most determined viewer.
  70. Vito Bonafacci
    Effectively a tutorial on some basic Catholic rituals, this isn't a great film - too many scenes are static or clumsily acted - but it is elevated by the touches of neorealist style in its small-bore focus and its soundtrack of classical compositions and Italian music from the 12th and 13th centuries.
  71. An Invisible Sign
    Cuter than a basket of puppies licking a litter of kittens, An Invisible Sign is an excruciatingly whimsical collision of adult themes and kid-friendly aesthetic.
  72. Caterpillar
    Shinobu Terajima, a major figure in Japan who won the best actress award at the 2010 Berlin film festival for Caterpillar, is effective as the wife, though Mr. Wakamatsu is more interested in scoring political and historical points than in shaping her character.
  73. The People vs. George Lucas
    Frenetic, paper-thin but entertaining documentary.
  74. Hobo with a Shotgun
    Only for those with a truly bottomless appetite for gore and fan-boy humor.
  75. Last Night
    Nominally a story about sex, lies and faithfulness, Last Night is more truly a cautionary tale about mousetrap narratives.
  76. Daydream Nation
    Daydream Nation hopscotches forward and backward and in and out of the surreal; its abrupt tangents are announced by chapter headings. In the most complicated sequence the film tracks three characters simultaneously. The cinematography is darkly lush in an ominous "Twin Peaks" mode.
  77. There Be Dragons
    Beyond the lugubrious pageantry, there is no sign of emotional or spiritual life in the film, only windy posturing.
  78. Passion Play
    You might reasonably assume that any movie starring Mr. Rourke and Mr. Murray would have to have something to recommend it. But aside from a haunting musical interlude, in which Mr. Rourke, with pathetic ineptitude, mimes playing a trumpet, Passion Play is barely palatable.
  79. Octubre
    With a visual style and a deadpan humor that owes an obvious debt to the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki ("Drifting Clouds"), they hold their shots long enough for you to scan details, look deep into faces and think on how little (or much) it takes to be happy. Here a painted Jesus hovers on a chipped wall, but it's an unholy family of three that finds heaven on earth.
  80. Jumping the Broom
    Instead of being a wild mixture of tones, it has very little tone at all, and moments of dramatic or comic intensity erupt awkwardly and then fizzle out.
  81. Harvest
    During this meticulously written and exquisitely acted film, you come to sense the bonds and the wounds binding three generations of Monopolis, who definitely love one another, but with reservations.
  82. The Beaver
    Nasty, brutish and as cuddly as a crusty old sock fished out of a sewer, the beaver or the beav, as I like to think of him, owns the film.
  83. Something Borrowed
    The most dispiriting thing about Something Borrowed is that with a little more art, craft and wit it could have been a lot better, maybe even good.
  84. Thor
    The absolute and unbroken mediocrity of Thor is evidence of its success. This movie is not distinctively bad, it is axiomatically bad. And THAT is depressing. A howling turkey is at least something to laugh at, and maybe even something to see. But Thor is an example of the programmed triumph of commercial calculation over imagination.
  85. Red White & Blue
    Red White & Blue proves the director a bona fide storyteller with more tools in his arsenal than shock and awe.
  86. Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil
    While it seems there's no getting away from this marketing aesthetic, the resemblance at times to a video game is far, far too acute.
  87. We Go Way Back
    More successful at conjuring atmosphere than at plot, We Go Way Back is nicely acted but frustratingly slight.
  88. Prom
    There are new tweeners every year. To them, the characters and plot devices in this perfectly competent film might well seem fresh.
  89. That's What I Am
    Mr. Harris's depiction of a saintly, soft-spoken, bow-tie-wearing middle-school teacher lends the movie a moral weight it probably couldn't have summoned had another actor played the role.
  90. Earthwork
    Imagine spending an afternoon watching a bunch of vagrants putter around on an abandoned city lot, and you've pretty much nailed the viewing experience of Earthwork, a painfully dull account of a year in the life of the Kansas crop artist Stan Herd.
  91. Exporting Raymond
    It has the structure and some of the pleasures of a well-made sitcom or docu-reality show, despite the nervous-looking, unhappy guy at its center; it could have been called "Nobody Understands Phil."
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Atlas Shrugged: Part I
    The resulting film, directed by Paul Johansson, feels rushed, amateurish and clumsy. It's not just the ideologies that feel oddly out of step with the present day, but the clothes, hairstyles and interiors.
  93. Sympathy for Delicious
    These characters may serve an obscure metaphorical agenda, but they make no psychological sense. And as the movie contemplates the rewards and perils of giving and receiving, it winds itself into stomach-turning knots.
  94. The Robber
    The Robber may have less on its mind than its sheen of seriousness would suggest, but the view is gorgeous.
  95. Lebanon, Pa.
    If Lebanon, Pa. is a tidy little indie with steady acting, it is too politically self-aware to transcend its well-mannered sense of fairness. But the performances by Ms. Kitson and Ms. Hurt give it spritzes of energy.
  96. 13 Assassins
    A stirring, unexpectedly moving story of love and blood.
  97. Fast Five
    In a free-for-all like this, where the laws of gravity and dictates of narrative logic are left to eat dust, it doesn't matter when anything takes place or why.
  98. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    The 3-D is sometimes less than transporting, and the chanting voices in the composer Ernst Reijseger's new-agey score tended to remind me of my last spa massage. Yet what a small price to pay for such time traveling!
  99. The Arbor
    Like a Ken Loach drama stripped to bare bones, The Arbor springs to life in the bright bitterness of Dunbar's prose, showcased in alfresco performances of contentious scenes from the play.
  100. Madea's Big Happy Family
    This time the suds outweigh the humor, and to its credit Mr. Perry's script doesn't duck tragic consequences.
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