The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. City of Ember
    At only 95 minutes, the movie feels as though it had been shredded in the editing room. In Hollywood-speak, it has a weak second act.
  2. The Night Before
    The emotional moments don’t pay off any better than most of the jokes, which reach for the safest kinds of provocative punch lines having to do with sex, race and religion.
  3. Hotel Artemis
    Mr. Pearce is also well-versed in staging and shooting decent action scenes, and building suspense enough to keep Hotel Artemis diverting in its overstuffed ambition. Add to that Ms. Foster’s welcome return to big-screen acting after a five-year layoff and you’ve got a movie almost worth seeing.
  4. Undisputed
    Lacks more than subtext: it barely has text. At times, the picture seems to have been edited with a blowtorch. But it gets the job done efficiently and swiftly.
  5. Kiss of the Dragon
    Mr. Li will come out of Kiss of the Dragon smelling like a rose; the combat couldn't be better. But next time around, he should leave the script to more capable hands.
  6. The Myth of Fingerprints
    Has some good performances (Ms. Moore's ongoing snit is a terrifically sustained bit of glowering), but it only barely begins to knit its self-pitying characters into a credible family unit. They are oddballs with attitude.
  7. American Pie
    Among this year's bumper crop of shallow teen-age movies, it is the shallowest and the most prurient.
  8. May
    Led by Ms. Bettis's discreetly campy May, the performances are a cut or two above what you would find in the average slasher film. But in the end that's all it is.
  9. Ocean's Twelve
    Enjoyable, unabashedly trivial caper flick.
  10. Burning Man: The Burning Sensation
    An appealing blend of counter-cultural idealism and hedonistic creativity.
  11. Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi Connection
    Never finds a comfortable fit between its biographies and its theorizing.
  12. Our Man in Tehran
    There’s nothing like hearing a harrowing tale from the people who lived it.
  13. Blue Bayou
    Beautifully relaxed family scenes help us forgive the ponderous direction.
  14. Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi
    Return of the Jedi doesn't really end the trilogy as much as it brings it to a dead stop. The film...is by far the dimmest adventure of the lot.
  15. Freakonomics
    The jocular screen adaptation of the 2005 best seller "Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" is a shallow but diverting alternative to the book.
  16. Away We Go
    Does it sound as if I hate this movie? Don't be silly. But don't be fooled. This movie does not like you.
  17. Heartless
    Best appreciated for its sustained creepy vibe and sporadically arresting images, Heartless moves from one outré moment to another, from one self-conscious allusion to the next ("Donnie Darko" and "Taxi Driver"). It doesn't go anywhere special or much of anywhere, though it goes there in appreciably icky style.
  18. Fading Gigolo
    Mr. Turturro’s musical choices in Fading Gigolo tend to feel, like so much here, generically applied instead of meaningfully coaxed from some essential, lived-in truth.
  19. Sex and Zen
    For those who accept the absurd simulations as realistic, Sex and Zen will have soft-core pornographic appeal. For others, its appeal should be as a cheeky if predictable sendup of erotic obsession and its unhappy consequences.
  20. Escape from Tomorrow
    None of it is as scary or as funny as it should be, and what starts out as a sly thumb in the eye of corporate power ends up as a muddled and amateurish homage to David Lynch.
  21. The Greasy Strangler
    Its willful determination to be outré proves its undoing.
  22. Glory Road
    Glory Road is satisfying less for its virtuosity than for its sincerity, and also because it will acquaint audiences with a remarkable episode that had ramifications far beyond the basketball court.
  23. Charlotte
    In the end, Charlotte is bereft of the spirit of the artist who made the uncanny “Life? or Theatre?” What an even better tribute the movie would have been had it also taken heated energy from Salomon’s art.
  24. Gemma Bovery
    Think of Gemma Bovery as an airy puff pastry, dripping with honey.
  25. Flash Gordon
    The best things in the production are the garishly absurd sets. The costumes, including the gold lame athletic supporters worn by the members of Ming's palace guard, suggest an adolescent's fever dream. The pacing is so funereal that this Flash Gordon seems far longer and far less funny that the 15-chapter serial, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938), which starred Buster Crabbe. [05 Dec 1980, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  26. 9 to 5
    The three actresses make an attractive team, but neither the screenplay, by Colin Higgins and Patricia Resnick, nor the director, Mr. Higgins, uses them very effectively. It's clearly a movie that began as someone's bright idea, which then went into production before anyone had time to give it a well-defined personality.
  27. The One and Only Ivan
    Mostly The One and Only Ivan consists of fairly standard Disney lessons, about the hardships of losing parents (real and surrogate) and how difficult it is to embrace change.
  28. 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.
  29. No Place on Earth
    The bare facts of the feat seize the imagination, even if Ms. Tobias’s competent documentary doesn’t quite rise to the challenge.
  30. Papillon
    A big, brave, stouthearted, sometimes romantic, sometimes silly melodrama with the kind of visual sweep you don't often find in movies anymore.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Magnum Force
    The movie is a muddle of morality.
  32. Nelly
    The character Ms. Émond and Ms. Mackay create is not likable, but is puzzling in an engrossing way. I am not sufficiently familiar with Ms. Fortier’s work to weigh in on how accurately this film represents it, but as an act of complex homage, “Nelly” gets to a few interesting places.
  33. Monday
    While Monday is not quite as bracing as Papadimitropoulos’s prior feature, “Suntan,” it’s a sharply observed, well-acted picture with a lot of tart detail and a few real stings in its tail.
  34. Low Down
    Low Down stumbles into the pitfalls of both addiction narratives and observer-style autobiography, even if Ms. Albany’s memoir suggests even rougher times. But it still catches in-between moments of closeness that aren’t always seen or heard.
  35. A Royal Night Out
    What makes A Royal Night Out palatable are the lead performances.
  36. The Indian in the Cupboard
    With its long silences washed over by banal, overused music, The Indian in the Cupboard is best watched for its ingenious tricks of scale and for an invitingly peaceful look. [14 July 1995, p.C3]
    • The New York Times
  37. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
    Leonard Nimoy, who directed this third installment, hasn't matched the playfulness and energy of ''Star Trek II,'' but he's way ahead of the first film, making up in earnestness what he lacks in style. That kind of conviction, while sometimes verging on undue self-importance, goes a long way toward making the material touching.
  38. Les Coquillettes
    While it may not always be satisfying to attend these soirees, when presented with the talents for repetition and juxtaposition of precise details demonstrated by Ms. Letourneur and Ms. Adler, these social customs are fascinating to observe from afar.
  39. Asher
    Unfortunately the pace is so relaxed as to be meandering; and Jay Zaretsky’s screenplay is cliché-packed.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Let's Scare Jessica to Death
    Although a disappointment generally, there are several things going for it; among them, the pleasantly aggressive title, which has, as is proper, only the most casual relation to the movie.
  41. Young Werther
    Booth and Pill make for a pair worth rooting for, but it’s Booth in particular, just barely but believably not of this world, who lends the film its winning sensibility.
  42. Everything Is Illuminated
    Taken on its own, without comparison with its literary source, the movie, Mr. Schreiber's first as writer and director, is thin and soft, whimsical when it should be darkly funny and poignant when it should be devastating.
  43. Stone
    The results prove disappointing, simultaneously over the top and underwhelming.
  44. Emile
    While most films in which the angry past confronts the guilty present degenerate into mawkish reconciliations, Emile errs on the side of restraint.
  45. Blink of an Eye
    The interactions between these real-life characters are here recalled with fondness and rue by the surviving participants. Taublieb’s approach is straightforward, but also a little pedestrian.
  46. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    That character, or rather Ford, or really the two of them together are the main arguments for seeing “Dial of Destiny,” which is as silly as you expect and not altogether as successful as you may hope.
  47. Felon
    Mr. Dorff’s hot-wired portrayal of a prisoner under physical and psychic siege gives Felon its emotional through line as Wade’s attitude metamorphoses from stunned disbelief, to terror, to despair, to fury and finally to hope.
  48. Retaliation
    Mostly, Retaliation accords Bloom a chance to deliver some impressive, anguished monologues, although the scenes focusing on those around him (particularly a late conversation between Montgomery and Ferns’s characters) hint at a more expansive, unrealized complexity.
  49. Beautiful Beings
    It doesn’t add up to much, despite the appealing young cast and the handsome cinematography that brings texture and visual interest to every grubby corner.
  50. Wicked: For Good
    Despite its unsettling political resonance, “Wicked” is finally most convincing as a story of an intense, soulfully nurturing female friendship.
  51. The Invention of Lying
    While the movie is a conceptual pip filled with quotable laughs and gentle pokes at religious faith at its most literal, it also looks so shoddy that you yearn for the camerawork, lighting and polish of his shows.
  52. Elemental
    The staggering design ambition balances out the plot’s affecting, relatable ordinariness.
  53. Storm
    For a political thriller, Storm is remarkably restrained. There are no flashbacks to the wars in the Balkans or to the atrocities in the hotel.
  54. The Yards
    For all its incongruities, The Yards is a serious film that strives for a moral complexity and a textural density rarely found in contemporary dramas.
  55. The Holy Land
    A barbed reflection on the great divide between secular and ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Israeli culture. But its digressive screenplay lacks focus and momentum and is too oblique to connect many of the dots between its characters and their behavior.
  56. Free Radicals
    Although Free Radicals overflows with messy feelings, it maintains such a measured distance from the gathered cries and whispers that it is difficult to empathize with the characters' fears and sorrows. Most of the women are victims, most of the men selfish pigs, and their stories are jarringly punctuated by brutish, joyless bouts of sex.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Death Race 2000
    In the end, it reveals itself to have nothing to say beyond the superficial about government or rebellion. And in the absence of such a statement, it becomes what it seems to have mocked—a spectacle glorifying the car is an instrument of violence.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Way of the Dragon
    Unlike its predecessor, Enter the Dragon, which was praised as a well-made movie, this picture is dreadfully slow and feeble whenever the cast isn't fighting. So you yearn for each battle, just as you wait impatiently for the songs or dances in a tedious musical.
  59. 7500
    One thing Vollrath does well is create a credibly claustrophobia-inducing atmosphere. Then again, when you restrict your camera to the inside of a cockpit, you’d have to be pretty incompetent not to.
  60. Benny & Joon
    Benny and Joon is a dangerously fanciful story of cute eccentrics, characters whose quirks are the very essence of their appeal. Some of us experience a form of red alert at the very notion of adorable oddballs on screen, but Benny and Joon turns out to be remarkably benign in that regard.
  61. The Lords of Salem
    Considerable care goes into establishing the premise, but the film eventually abandons psychological subtlety for hallucinatory garishness, which is too bad.
  62. Renaissance
    Over the course of 105 minutes, the brutal high contrast begins to strain the eyes. Effectively moody as it is, the style makes a convoluted story of corporate greed, high-tech espionage and science run amok even more difficult to follow.
  63. Wayne's World
    The film tends to be funny when confining itself to short sketches or dopey television-based humor, flat when pretending to be anything more.
  64. All Good Things
    Certainly the fictionalized brood in All Good Things is equal to the Friedmans in terms of dysfunction, and they're loaded.
  65. One More Time
    This is a story full of people being miserable, humorless and selfish, despite having been given a lot in life, and they’re pretty much the same at the end of it as they were at the beginning.
  66. Crank
    For a movie premised on unrelenting action, Crank proves fatally turgid.
  67. There There
    The writer-director, Andrew Bujalski, zeros in on the delicate dances and negotiations between the people in these two-handers, which percolate with sly humor, decency, curiosity and sheer nerve.
  68. Special
    Either way, it doesn’t quite go far enough as psychological study or cultural commentary.
  69. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
    It leaves itself wide open to charges of pretentiousness. Yet "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" is so entertaining and so vigorously performed, especially by Newman in the title role, that its pretensions become part of its robust, knock-about style.
  70. Keeping Up with the Steins
    Keeping Up With the Steins would have been a much better film if it had waited twice as long before retracting its fangs.
  71. Heads of State
    It’s loud albeit harmless japery, best appreciated with your air-conditioning cranked to movie theater levels.
  72. It's a Disaster
    The movie lurches from the improbably silly to the drearily so, while the characters remain so emotionally and psychologically divorced from life that they might as well be zombies or sitcom stick figures.
  73. The Patsy
    Another moronic mishmash in which Mr. Lewis falls all over himself.
  74. Chelsea on the Rocks
    An enraptured fantasia of high times at the hotel, the film is so intoxicated with the Chelsea’s bohemian mystique it virtually consumes itself.
  75. Flawless
    A mildly diverting period heist movie.
  76. Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal
    This witty first feature is a flawed but diverting meditation on finding inspiration while losing your soul.
  77. Terraferma
    As Terraferma tightens its focus on a courageous resolution of tough issues, too much nuance is jettisoned along the way.
  78. Daybreakers
    The narrative may flag, but the doomsday atmosphere and George Liddle’s production design remain vivid until the final, blood-splattered reel.
  79. Trishna
    Life is suffering, as the Buddha said (including in Hardy's emotionally grinding novels), but it's more complex and contradictory than the ginned-up realism Mr. Winterbottom delivers here.
  80. The Book of Clarence
    If The Book of Clarence doesn’t totally work, its combination of the sacred and the irreverent is enchanting. It gets bogged down in its own mud, but it’s certainly shooting for the stars.
  81. The Gorge
    For all the elaborate weaponry, production design and (eventually) frantic action offered here, this movie crackles most as a lively pas de deux between Taylor-Joy and Teller, who commendably take their material seriously no matter how seriously ridiculous it gets.
  82. Lila Says
    Ms. Giocante's intoxicating mixture of gamine innocence and womanly knowingness is almost too much for the movie - Lila is surely too much for Chimo - but her charisma, and Mr. Doueiri's insouciant, heart-on-the-sleeve style give it a mood that is at once breathlessly romantic and cannily down to earth.
  83. Rabbit Trap
    Rabbit Trap, the horror folk tale from Bryn Chainey, is that unfortunate kind of creation: a work that so clearly possesses the tools that might make a good, captivating film, but instead ends up lost in the workshop, too busy admiring its own handiwork.
  84. The Cured
    Anyone digging through the cemetery soil again had better have fresh ideas. The Cured, the debut feature from David Freyne, has roughly two.
  85. Severe Clear
    At its most provocative, Severe Clear pungently evokes a heroic Marine Corps mystique.
  86. You All Are Captains
    I can't say I enjoyed it, but I acknowledge that You All Are Captains has something to express that can't be said except the way it's said, and that way there be art.
  87. R100
    Mr. Matsumoto, as if realizing that viewers might need to wake up, stuffs a ball gag in a child’s mouth and throws in some reflexive nonsense involving an old director and some critics who seem to be watching the same movie you are. They think it’s terrible and finally it’s hard to disagree.
  88. Pet Sematary
    But when they settle into a groove that aligns with the novel’s, the movie delivers great unsettling jolts that approximate the power of King’s vision.
  89. C.H.U.D.
    C.H.U.D. makes no pretension toward serious theses about government or the environment. It is meant to be light commercial entertainment, and in the category of horror films it stands as a praiseworthy effort.
  90. 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.
  91. Paul
    While Paul seems great conceptually, he's not particularly interesting or surprising.
  92. Color Me Kubrick
    Even if it doesn't add up to more than a fitfully amusing collection of comic sketches, Color Me Kubrick is a platform for John Malkovich to burst into lurid purple flame.
  93. Going All the Way
    In "Going All the Way," a flashy movie adaptation of Dan Wakefield's popular 1970 novel about growing up in the heartland in the repressed 1950s, Mark Pellington, a director from the world of music video, has inflated a realistic memoir into a garish, hyperkinetic social satire.
  94. Bart Got a Room
    The movie imprisons its talented cast (including Alia Shawkat as Danny’s overlooked soul mate and Brandon Hardesty as his worldly best friend) in roles that leave little room for anything but caricature.
  95. My Wife Is an Actress
    A terrifically deft picture about the thick line that separates movie glamour from the real world, and the thin line between common sense and paranoia.
  96. Holy Smoke
    As Holy Smoke moves from its early mix of rapture and humor into this more serious, confrontational stage, it runs into trouble.
  97. The Sea Is Watching
    Fortunately, Mr. Kumai, who himself has shown no aversion to baroque melodrama, leans here toward a plain and direct style that is tasteful and intelligent, a boon, given the predictability of the story. He understands the difference between pitiable and pitiful.
  98. The Ring
    While impressively made, this impassive and cold feature fails, in a spectacular fashion, to deliver the thrills.
  99. Osmosis Jones
    Often very smart about being silly.
  100. How to Grow a Band
    Ego struggles and innovator's laments (nobody gets us!) are a refrain in many band documentaries. How to Grow a Band adds a modest but effective entry to the genre's back catalog.
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