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. Modus Operandi
    You can admire the craftsmanship and enjoy the retro soundtrack, supplied by a roster of Milwaukee musicians, but it seems likely that Modus Operandi was more amusing to make than it is to watch.
  2. Stone
    The results prove disappointing, simultaneously over the top and underwhelming.
  3. A New Love in Tokyo (1994)
    While honesty dictates that this movie, directed by Banmei Takahashi, be classified first and foremost as erotica, it is erotica that finds room for real sweetness and intellectual pretensions along with its kink.
  4. The Road Dance
    Shifting between stagy sincerity and startling realism (the labor scene is particularly colorful), The Road Dance is a vividly rendered, if ultimately schematic portrait of feminine resilience.
  5. Lakota Nation vs. United States
    This stunning film, directed by Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli, interleaves interviews of Lakota activists and elders with striking images of the Black Hills and its wildlife, historical documents and news reports, clips from old movies and other archival footage to extraordinary effect, demonstrating not only the physical and cultural violence inflicted on the Lakota but also their deep connection to the Black Hills, the area where Mount Rushmore was erected.
  6. Since I Been Down
    “We’ve caused pain,” that inmate says, “primarily ’cause we were in pain.” Far from seeming like an excuse, in Since I Been Down, this observation sounds like a way toward reckoning and change.
  7. Downstream to Kinshasa
    The film sometimes flags in energy as it cuts between these different strands, but its pace feels faithful to just how halting the fight for justice can be when democracy becomes impenetrable to those it serves.
  8. Disco
    By the time it is over, Disco has crossed the line that separates being productively ambiguous from being simply cryptic.
  9. Raining in the Mountain (1979)
    This is spectacular, exhilarating entertainment. One might be moved to say, corny as it sounds, “All hail King Hu.”
  10. The Keeper
    It’s contrary to the movie’s spirit to judge Bert, but the evasive treatment of his wartime experiences plays like a dodge: His past exists as a kind of amorphous trauma, reduced to shorthand in shamelessly placed flashbacks.
  11. Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl
    It is endearing in its frankness: a profile of a star after her return from the firmament.
  12. Beyond The Visible: Hilma af Klint
    Beyond the Visible bristles with the excitement of discovery and also with the impatience that recognition has taken so long. It refreshes the eyes and the mind.
  13. Police Story (1985)
    Police Story is of principal interest as a souvenir of another culture.
  14. Chasing Great
    For a movie that revolves around a notoriously violent sport, Michelle Walshe and Justin Pemberton’s profile takes a soft, superficial approach. It makes a rote installment of ESPN’s “30 for 30” look like Pulitzer-worthy muckraking.
  15. Above & Beyond Acoustic: Giving Up the Day Job
    The movie, directed by Myles Desenberg and Paul Dugdale, frequently counts down to the Hollywood Bowl show as it chronicles rehearsals and other tour stops, but there’s no real suspense, because the footage from that show is interspersed throughout the movie from the very beginning.
  16. The Great Silence (1968)
    There is something about the film’s brazen mixing of incompatible elements that defies categorization, imitation or even sober critical assessment. It’s anarchic and rigorous, sophisticated and goofy, heartfelt and cynical. The score, by Ennio Morricone, is as mellow as wine. The action is raw, nasty and blood-soaked. The story is preposterous, the politics sincere.
  17. Youth
    As a straight, sentimental melodrama, Youth works well. While there are a lot of conventional tropes, the cast enacts them with such fresh, tenderhearted sincerity that they regain some power.
  18. Bill Nye: Science Guy
    In the film Bill Nye: Science Guy, Mr. Nye, the 1990s children’s-television personality with the signature bow tie, warns of “an anti-science movement” afoot in this country. And this delightful, revealing documentary, directed by David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg, offers evidence supporting that assessment.
  19. World on a Wire (1973)
    World on a Wire, while too slow and diffuse to count as a lost masterpiece, is valuable in expanding our sense of what Fassbinder could do and is also a source of much visual and intellectual pleasure in its own right.
  20. RED
    It is possible to have a good time at RED, but it is not a very good movie.
  21. Down Terrace
    However persuasively acted, this mélange of cinéma vérité, slapstick and murder - whose story has a lot in common with the recent Australian gangster film "Animal Kingdom" - has too many narrative gaps for its pieces to cohere satisfactorily.
  22. Jackass 3-D
    It just might be that America's favorite jackasses, having played around with sharks in their last big-screen effort ("Jackass Number Two" of course), have this time actually jumped one, and in 3-D no less.
  23. Carlos
    Like the convictions of some born into religious families, his (Carlos) Marxism seems more a matter of habit than faith. What seems to turn him on is power, which, the movie suggests, he nurtured alongside his luxe tastes.
  24. Samson and Delilah
    How do you know you're looking at a pretty good piece of filmmaking? When the director and actors can make you care about the central characters even though they exchange almost no dialogue.
  25. Gerrymandering
    An illustrated civics lesson that strains to make its complicated, shadowy subject - electoral redistricting - a political hot topic.
  26. Secretariat
    The bigger and truer stars of this enjoyable, sometimes accidentally entertaining movie are the five horses that take turns playing Secretariat.
  27. I Spit on Your Grave
    Female-empowerment fantasy or just plain prurience, "Grave" is extremely efficient grindhouse. If there is any message here at all, it's don't mess with a novelist: being creative is her job.
  28. It's Kind of a Funny Story
    There are humor and pathos, but a crucial dimension of intensity is missing. The best I can say is that it's kind of a good movie.
  29. Life as We Know It
    It's enough to say that the bland romantic comedy Life as We Know It, in which there is not a single deviation from formula, is well made for its corporate type.
  30. Nowhere Boy
    It's a pleasant-enough creation story to revisit, one weighted down by melodrama and lifted up by some rocking tunes.
  31. My Soul to Take
    A thoroughly dreary, by-the-numbers exercise.
  32. It's a Wonderful Afterlife
    May be a busy trifle, but it has its good-natured charms and agreeable gross-outs.
  33. Inside Job
    Inside Job, a sleek, briskly paced film whose title suggests a heist movie, is the story of a crime without punishment, of an outrage that has so far largely escaped legal sanction and societal stigma.
  34. Letters to Father Jaakob
    Letters transforms a picture-postcard location and odd-couple narrative into a pretty, and pretty predictable, snooze. Yet the acting is flawless, the tone gentle and observational, and Leila's transformation, when it occurs, is unforced and unaccompanied by pious lecturing.
  35. Marwencol
    Four years in the making, Marwencol emerges as a number of things: an absorbing portrait of an outsider artist; a fascinating journey from near-death to active life; a meditation on the brain's ability to forge new pathways when old ones have been destroyed.
  36. As Good as Dead
    Several varieties of creepy run through As Good as Dead, a gruesomely alluring tale of long-simmering revenge.
  37. Rachel
    Regrettably, the film, almost devoid of music, is drastically undermined at its end by an inadvertently comic rap tribute by the Kansas City performance artist to the "American citizen with Palestinian blood."
  38. Case 39
    Radiating a distinctly retro vibe, this throwaway thriller from the German director Christian Alvart tosses a bone to Renée Zellweger, who chews it to a nub as Emily Jenkins, a harried social worker.
  39. The Social Network
    When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark's face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it's a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.
  40. Let Me In
    The subtext of the relationship is not sexuality, as it is in "Twilight" or "True Blood," but rather the loneliness of children and their often unrecognized reservoirs of rage.
  41. 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.
  42. Douchebag
    The title may be mildly provocative in its vulgarity, but the most striking feature of this movie is its dullness.
  43. Hatchet II
    Swift and amusingly brainless, Hatchet II more than delivers on splatter expectations.
  44. Ip Man
    Over all, the film is a prime exhibit in the relentless and regrettable shift away from a natural, allusive, romantic Hong Kong style and toward a mainland studio aesthetic that is stagebound, literal, overstuffed and sentimental - like the big-budget Hollywood weepies of the '60s or the '80s.
  45. Leaving
    Here, a contemporary French white woman who yearns for liberté, égalité and fraternité is as much a prisoner of her circumstances as women were once upon a time and still are in some cultures, though truly it's all the clichés in this film that make her a captive.
  46. Hot Summer Days (Chuen sing yit luen - yit lat lat)
    Do they have date movies in China? Probably, and Hot Summer Days, an enjoyable concoction of loosely intertwined stories of love and obsession, is just right for that purpose.
  47. Speed-Dating
    A tired mash-up of every men-behaving-badly sitcom ever to grace a third-tier television network, Speed-Dating tries to coax laughs from characters so dated even Eddie Murphy would balk.
  48. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    And yet something vital here works. There are, come to think of it, a lot of little things.
  49. You Again
    There is not a laugh to be found in this rancid, misogynistic revenge comedy.
  50. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
    Legend of the Guardians may be a hoot, but for all its pyrotechnics, it fails to soar.
  51. Buried
    In the movie's cheapest, most exploitative gesture - just as it is about to run out of tricks - a snake slithers into the pine box in which Paul awakens bound and gagged, not knowing where he is. With that gimmick, the movie sacrifices its last shred of integrity.
  52. A Mother's Courage: Talking Back to Autism
    There is no pat resolution here, but the sight of a mother finally able to connect with her child across autism's chasm is more than stirring.
  53. Howl
    Not quite a biopic, not really a documentary and only loosely an adaptation, Howl does something that sounds simple until you consider how rarely it occurs in films of any kind. It takes a familiar, celebrated piece of writing and makes it come alive.
  54. Enter the Void
    With beauty, mild and sharp jolts, and mesmerizing camerawork, he (Gaspar Noe) tries to open the doors of perception.
  55. Waiting for 'Superman'
    By showing how fiercely dedicated idealists are making a difference, it is a call to arms.
  56. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
    For the most part, everyone struggles through, with at best mixed success. The audience included.
  57. Jack Goes Boating
    As is so often the case in modest, aimless little movies like this one, it is the acting that saves Jack Goes Boating from triviality or worse.
  58. Easy A
    Easy A isn't nearly as good a movie as "Clueless," Ms. Heckerling's contemporary pastiche of the Jane Austen novel "Emma." But the one-liner-loaded screenplay has the same insouciant charm.
  59. Alpha and Omega
    This talking-animal tale - has old-fashioned backgrounds that occasionally achieve a touch of grandeur, but that's about the best that can be said for it.
  60. Devil
    A serviceable burst of high-end hokum, Devil classes up a flimsy, religion-themed plot (by M. Night Shyamalan) with the kind of limber cinematography only someone like Tak Fujimoto can deliver.
  61. Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo
    These are vivid, flawed, even introspective characters. And they're classic American strivers. With rodeo, but not just that, they hope to go beyond where they have been.
  62. The Town
    A solid, minor entry in the annals of Boston crime drama. Not as florid as "The Departed" or as sadly soulful as "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" - or even as sticky and gamy as "Gone Baby Gone," Mr. Affleck's previous film.
  63. Catfish
    When the going gets weird, Hunter S. Thompson used to say, the weird turn pro, but these filmmakers never transcend their own amateurism. They turn what could have been a brilliant exploration of the hidden corners of contemporary reality into an opportunity for gawking and condescension.
  64. The Freebie
    A smart seriocomic playlet with some emotionally harsh moments, although it refrains from plumbing its subject in agonizing depth.
  65. The Girl
    As tadpoles morph into frogs, and fears are conquered, The Girl delivers a satisfying, sun-dappled fable about the kindness of strangers and the cruelty of peers.
  66. Picture Me: A Model's Diary
    Say what you like about "America's Next Top Model," any single episode of Tyra Banks's campy confection offers more insight into objectification and disposability than this film in its entirety.
  67. Last Day of Summer
    Mr. Yudin keeps dragging things back to the restaurant and bathroom humor. He sabotages his own story, as well as the creditable work being done by Mr. Qualls and Ms. Reed.
  68. The Happy Poet
    The consistent comic tone of those earlier scenes - a gentle squirm - makes The Happy Poet a promising debut.
  69. The Anchorage
    At several points the depiction of Ulla's isolation takes on slasher-movie overtones, which undercuts the general solemnity but doesn't really add anything to the experience.
  70. Music Makes a City: A Louisville Orchestra Story
    Viewers unfamiliar with artists like Lukas Foss and Gunther Schuller will find themselves agreeably challenged. And stirred.
  71. The Other City
    The film's most vivid presence is seen but barely able to speak: Jimmy, a gay man in his 30s dying at Joseph's House, an AIDS hospice. Anyone who has kept a deathbed vigil will relate to his suffering and his family's, and perhaps arrive at a sense of just how universal this epidemic truly is.
  72. 3 Billion and Counting
    The guy's not much of a filmmaker, but he certainly gets your attention.
  73. Never Let Me Go
    Alas, what's missing is the spark of life, the jolt of the unexpected - something beyond tears - to puncture the falseness of a film world, which, by its insistence on its own beauty, obscures the tragedy that the three characters, by their nature, cannot express.
  74. Kings of Pastry
    The film builds in interest and intrigue as it goes along, helped immeasurably by the directors' choice - canny or fortunate or both - of the astonishingly good-natured and likable Jacquy Pfeiffer, an Alsace-born, Chicago-based chef, as their chief protagonist.
  75. Bran Nue Dae
    The bits of Aboriginal lore imparted along the way by Tadpole add flavoring to a sugar-coated romp that has the craft of a high school revue.
  76. Legendary
    The schmaltzy sports movie Legendary is a kind of contemporary answer to the old Charles Atlas ad in which a 97-pound weakling develops muscles and triumphantly punches out the bully at the beach.
  77. Lovely, Still
    It's beautifully played and will hit home with anyone who has had to struggle with the most difficult aspects of aging.
  78. The Virginity Hit
    Unfortunately, the things that can be funny and even liberating in a movie like "American Pie" end up looking coarse and slightly depressing in the scripted pseudoreality of The Virginity Hit.
  79. Ahead of Time
    Ahead of Time follows Ms. Gruber to speaking engagements and encounters with relatives and old friends. Ever present are her lucid memory and articulate, compassionate bearing. She is an inspiration for career women, certainly, but also for us all.
  80. Heartbreaker
    Yes, Heartbreaker is diverting, intermittently charming and occasionally funny, but it is also a jumble of jammed-together notions. Unevenly paced, it goes on too many tangents to cohere as a persuasive comic fable about love and money.
  81. Hideaway (Le refuge)
    But while the Pietà imagery startles, it makes increasing sense as the story builds around it. Because as Hideaway deepens and evolves, you understand that the image of Mousse cradling Louis is a manifestation of her love: this was how she held him, with a tender love that in its depth was itself holy.
  82. I'm Still Here
    My guess is that after years of being the trick pony, he wanted to see what it was like to be the ringmaster.
  83. Resident Evil: Afterlife
    This witless installment features the usual ultra-slow-motion mayhem and helpful freeze-frames to allow us to admire the extra dimension. Fans will not be happy, however, to learn that Ms. Jovovich is more decently clothed this time around.
  84. The Romantics
    The other alumni, played by Malin Akerman, Adam Brody, Jeremy Strong and Rebecca Lawrence, are given such short shrift that they come across more as sarcastic commentators than as characters.
  85. Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould
    A tour de force of archival research and dogged interviewing, and the portrait it presents is remarkably complete.
  86. Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?)
    The point of it is not, in the end, to explain him or solve the mystery of his life, but rather to spend time in his company and understand why he is someone to be missed.
  87. The Afterlight
    A minimalist mood poem to loss and alienation.
  88. Sequestro: A Story of Kidnapping
    Filming over four years and tracking several cases, the Brazilian director Jorge W. Atalla favors a fevered shooting style that's repetitious and disorienting but also effortlessly dramatic.
  89. Race to Nowhere
    Spurred by the medical and emotional problems of her own three children, Ms. Abeles embarked on a deeply personal inquiry into the insanely hectic lives of too many of our offspring.
  90. Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1
    The story is deepened with a distinctively European political subtext as the increasingly grandiose Mesrine engages in a running dialogue with various characters about the differences between gangsters and revolutionaries.
  91. Going the Distance
    Romantic comedies nowadays tend to be either aggressively coarse or artificially sweet, and Going the Distance finds a workable middle ground.
  92. Machete
    For all its political button pushing, Machete is too preposterous to qualify as satire. The only viewers it is likely to upset are the same kind of people who once claimed that the purple Tinky Winky in "Teletubbies" promoted a gay agenda.
  93. Last Train Home
    Mr. Fan's documentary is informed by a melancholy humanism, and finds unexpected beauty in almost unbearably harsh circumstances. It tells the story of a family caught, and possibly crushed, between the past and the future - a story that, on its own, is moving, even heartbreaking. Multiplied by 130 million, it becomes a terrifying and sobering panorama of the present.
  94. The Winning Season
    Gets lost in a fog of indecision and compromise.
  95. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
    The director Zhang Yimou honors the unlikely affinity between himself and Joel and Ethan Coen with a remake of their movie "Blood Simple."
  96. Prince of Broadway
    The movie is sharp, charismatic and so light on its feet we never know which way it will turn.
  97. White Wedding
    Wedding chaos has been heavily mined by both film and stage comedies, but Jann Turner, the director here, keeps this story fresh, aided by the effortless interplay between Mr. Nkosi and Mr. Seiphemo (who are credited with Ms. Turner as writers). The goat helps too.
  98. Max Manus
    Buffed to an expensive-looking gloss and dressed in period-perfect finery, Max Manus has an old-fashioned sincerity that entertains without engaging.
  99. The American
    It is a reasonably skillful exercise in genre and style, a well-made vessel containing nothing in particular, though some of its features - European setting, slow pacing, full-frontal female nudity - are more evocative of the art house than of the multiplex.
  100. Takers
    There is plenty of nonsense, a great deal of stylish posturing and clothes-horsing, and a few action sequences that manage to be both gripping and preposterous.
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