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. Dark Blue World
    This could be called an art house version of "Pearl Harbor," except that sounds vaguely nutritious, like fat- free yogurt or a historical episode of A&E's "Biography." But Dark Blue World is all empty carbs, like malted milk balls.
  2. Bachelor Party
    It takes much longer than might be expected for Bachelor Party...to degenerate into a mindless mob scene. Until it takes that turn for the worse, the movie is actually funny. That is, it's as funny as "Police Academy," which like this film was written by Neal Israel and Pat Proft. And it's certainly funnier than it has been made to look by its advertising campaign, which seems to feature the usual gang of suspects enjoying the usual sophomoric sex romp.
  3. Breaking Upwards
    Like many relationships, Breaking Upwards starts in bed and ends on the street. The journey in between, however, feels as new as anything a tiny budget and a boatload of talent could produce.
  4. Citizen Gangster
    A good-looking but passionless affair that remains stubbornly aloof from its audience.
  5. The 24th
    This stultifyingly earnest movie makes its points with such a heavy hand that its horrors struggle to resonate.
  6. Take Me to the River
    Just keep your eyes on the old folks; they are where the heart — and the sweet soul music — of this movie lies.
  7. Mr. Saturday Night
    Maggio ends his story in the early 1980s, even though Stigwood lived until 2016. He is thinking small about a man who used to dream big.
  8. Scarlet
    “Scarlet” is peppered with a few exceptional moments of inspiration, but ends up caught in an awkward push-pull between Shakespeare’s text and the fantastical spaces where Hosoda’s vision extends.
  9. Wine Country
    The comedy is situational and confessional, the flat one-liners mixed in with more memorable physical comedy. The scripted lines rarely zing, sing or sting (some seem improvised), but when the performers fall down or screw up their faces, you get to watch them fill in their characters with something like real feeling.
  10. The Last Vermeer
    The film moves from detective story to courtroom drama with nicely sketched character studies as a bonus.
  11. An Everlasting Piece
    The director serves up a nice helping of blarney, but he seems to have left his schmaltz in Baltimore.
  12. Scream 3
    Funny and brisk, with enough good lines to make the comedy more satisfying than the somewhat routine but still unsettling jolts to the spine.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Funhouse
    Mr. Hooper almost persuades us that he is up to more than just gore, creepiness and trauma.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Invisible Woman
    The script is as creaky as a two-wheeled cart and were it not for the fact that John Barrymore is taking a ride in it we hate to think what "The Invisible Woman" might have turned out to be.
  15. It's What's Inside
    Even the twists feel obvious and not all that interesting, more the fulfillment of plot points seeded early on rather than startling turns of fortune.
  16. Alpha
    Softer and gentler than either of its forbears, "Alpha" hums with a dreamlike unease, a movie less concerned with sensation than with genuine feeling.
  17. Concussion
    Ms. Passon ultimately seems to skirt some of the larger life questions hinted at along the way.
  18. Eraser
    Eraser means to show off the star's standard persona against a backdrop of lavish special effects, which is certainly a formula that's worked before. But this is no "Terminator," since its tricks are so much more arbitrary and over-the-top.
  19. Escobar: Paradise Lost
    Nick might usurp most of the screen time, but it’s Mr. Del Toro, face flickering from benevolent to vicious and body heaving with literal and symbolic weight, who seizes the film.
  20. Game 6
    A tale of one man's meltdown that ought to have an expiration date of Oct. 27, 2004, stamped on every frame.
  21. Adrift
    The chronological back-and-forth diffuses the dread and suspense — the feeling of desperate uncertainty implied by the title — that might have made for a more intense, more memorable yarn.
  22. Stuffed
    While Derham banks on the surprise factor of seeing taxidermists acting as stealth conservationists, the film leaves the impression that she could have scalpel-dug into deeper layers.
  23. Hard Luck Love Song
    Corsbie has filmmaking energy to spare but also makes many undergrad errors.
  24. Fever Pitch
    Still, despite the visual clumsiness and the production's tattered seams, I found myself rooting for this movie anyway, partly because Lindsey and Ben make a nice fit, as do the actors playing them, partly because the Farrellys bring so much heart to their movies, and partly because Ms. Barrymore inspires more goodwill than any other young actress I can think of working today in American movies.
  25. In the Land of Blood and Honey
    Both Ms. Marjanovic and Mr. Kostic are very fine (like the rest of the cast they deliver their dialogue in Bosnian) and they navigate the contradictions of their characters' feelings, the flashes of hate, the surrender to desire, with delicacy.
  26. The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger
    The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger is a challenging, sometimes poignant engagement with the man and his work.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Earthquake
    For those who have a soft spot for calamity pictures, there's a sense of ritual cleansing afterward. And for some reason, it also made me hungry.
  28. Down a Dark Hall
    With each new element, Down a Dark Hall reveals itself, with improbable delight, to be genuinely strange — a movie in which viewers can pick their own pleasure, no two spectators having exactly the same experience.
  29. Monster
    Based upon a 1999 young-adult novel by Walter Dean Myers, Monster conveys the ache for all that its protagonist could lose, but it can’t escape the dramatic ruts of its own creation.
  30. Straw
    The ending is perhaps too twisting for its own good. But Henson — so deeply committed to her character’s emotional cratering — still makes us care.
  31. Winter Passing
    Its familiar story of an embittered child's homecoming and confrontation with a parent throws off dramatic sparks, but they never flare into a blaze.
  32. Tag
    Tag, unlike too many of its recent ilk, at least bothers to be a movie, rather than a television sketch distended to feature length. The performers don’t seem to have been shoved in front of the camera and instructed to be funny. They have to work for their laughs, and to find coherence as an ensemble.
  33. 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.
  34. Hank: 5 Years from the Brink
    It’s informative but not enlightening, and Mr. Berlinger packs in chattering news clips and a score that’s audible under the interview.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    13 Ghosts
    It's too bad Mr. Castle, in serving up his ghosts, didn't simply have some cartoonists draw, 'em on in full view.
  36. Heart and Souls
    When the film announces, halfway through, that it will be devoting the rest of its running time to tying up these loose ends, the audience may as well give up the ghost.
  37. The Wizard of the Kremlin
    It’s a useful framework for understanding leaders around the world, and Baranov is the ideal cipher, someone who intimately understands how easily people’s minds are swayed and molded.
  38. Migration
    In the end, Migration moves along at jet speed while often feeling labored.
  39. Across the Universe
    Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.
  40. Harsh Times
    Mr. Bales's spectacular technical performance of a toxic bad boy on the fast track to hell somehow lacks an inner core.
  41. The Belly of an Architect
    The Belly of an Architect does have a humanizing element in the form of Mr. Dennehy, who brings a robust physicality to Kracklite without missing the essentially cerebral nature of the role; this is one of the best things he has done.
  42. 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.
  43. A Knight's Tale
    The picture itself is good-humored, but bland and predictable. It's a cross between an All-American vaudevillian version of "Shakespeare in Love" and Mel Brooks's "Robin Hood: Men in Tights."
  44. Human Nature
    Should have been more polished, and less tame.
  45. How Stella Got Her Groove Back
    The movie, adapted by Terry McMillan from her semi-autobiographical novel, is pointedly boundary-breaking in its positive portrayal of a May-September relationship between a younger man and an older woman.
  46. A Dirty Shame
    I object to A Dirty Shame not because it is offensive - to do so would be another way of congratulating Mr. Waters for his bogus daring - but because it is boring. Beyond offering a catalog of interesting practices and lampooning their dedicated practitioners, the movie has very little to say about sex.
  47. Unscrewed
    If Ms. Smith's and Mr. Hoffman's mopey, sheepish performances are quite convincing and ultimately sad, the movie constructed around them doesn't really know what it wants to say or how to say it.
  48. Falling Down
    Falling Down is the most interesting, all-out commercial American film of the year to date, and one that will function much like a Rorschach test to expose the secrets of those who watch it.
  49. Nonnas
    Nonnas serves up ethnic comedy on a platter of ham and cheese.
  50. Waterworld
    It lacks the coherent fantasy of truly enveloping science fiction, preferring to concentrate on flashy, isolated stunts that say more about expense than expertise. [28 July 1995]
  51. Guilty of Romance
    Most disturbing and fascinating is the mixture of Izumi’s liberation with her degradation in this film, which plays like a more horrific version of David Lynch’s “Mullholland Drive.”
  52. The Dogs of War
    It demonstrates the kind of intelligence and thought one doesn't often find in a movie aimed at the action-adventure crowd. This is evident as much in what the film doesn't do and say as in what is actually seen on the screen.
  53. Return to Paradise
    The film's cool, sober texture and its clever characters are often more interesting than the larger plot.
  54. Posse
    Mr. Van Peebles and his screenwriters, Sy Richardson and Dario Scardapane, care most about making their points emphatically, even if that sometimes leaves Posse riding heavy in the saddle. Luckily, most of their film is fast-paced and star-studded enough to avoid an overly preachy tone.
  55. Capital
    Its indictment of capitalism is so shrill and one-note that it may just as easily set off fits of giggling, because its characters are so ridiculously evil.
  56. a-ha: the Movie
    There’s a slight wonky interest in seeing the grind of recording sessions and fan service. But the film feels promotional enough that it won’t lean into the potential humor of their situation.
  57. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
    It is firmly directed by John Sturges (of Bad Day at Black Rock fame), and it is ruggedly acted by all and sundry—of which there is quit[e] a heap.
  58. Transporter 2
    Purely shallow but never dull, the film wisely pushes the limits of absurdity to the extreme, making it easier to submit to its sheer camp.
  59. Million Dollar Arm
    Every conflict is softened by inspirational clichés.
  60. Us and Them
    With frothing energy and unfettered vulgarity, Us and Them lances the boil of working-class grievance and watches as the infection spreads to everyone in its path.
  61. Mimic
    Ghoulish interest is a prerequisite for watching Mira Sorvino (as a bold and athletic entomologist) act against performers who have mandibles, or for appreciating the care with which nymph, juvenile and adult insect villains have been devised.
  62. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
    It’s unclear what Mandico is trying to say, if anything, and the film overstays its welcome — even the wildest visuals lose their power to stun after a while — but “After Blue” certainly is sui generis.
  63. American Violet
    The movie's staunchly liberal point of view extends to the 2000 presidential election, which is shown unfolding in the background. Al Gore's concession speech is used to suggest that the systemic racism in Melody is a symptom of a broader climate of injustice.
  64. What's the Matter with Kansas?
    The specific roots of a pervasive sense of disenfranchisement are barely described, as are strategies for liberals seeking to reclaim the state. What's the Matter With Kansas? depicts a groundswell of anger but largely ignores the external forces that helped shape it.
  65. God Bless America
    Mr. Goldthwait's screenplay is essentially a comedy act fleshed out with a story he doesn't try to make convincing.
  66. Three Stars
    The dishes dazzle in Lutz Hachmeister's documentary Three Stars, a cinematic helping of some of the world's finest restaurants - and of their chefs' opinions.
  67. L for Leisure
    It is possible to admire Mr. Kalman and Ms. Horn’s ambition and at the same time have no idea what they were trying to achieve.
  68. Tiger Eyes
    It’s all a bit precious and predictable.
  69. Religulous
    Much of Mr. Maher's film is extremely funny in a similarly irreverent, offhanded way. Some true believers -- at least those who have a sense of humor about their faith -- may even be amused. But most will not.
  70. 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.
  71. Embattled
    When it’s showing its sensitive side, the film, scripted by David McKenna (“American History X”) and directed by Nick Sarkisov, unexpectedly shines.
  72. Ironweed
    Despite its nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time, its superstar cast and its $23 million budget, Mr. Babenco's Ironweed is skeletal, a mere outline of Mr. Kennedy's far more resonant book.
  73. The Family Stone
    The women make The Family Stone, especially Ms. Parker, whose nimble performance is reason alone to see the film: not since Philippe Petit has anyone walked a tightrope with such finesse - and in high heels, no less.
  74. The Glass Castle
    It’s both too tidy and too messy, and at the same time neither quite wild nor quite sensible enough.
  75. Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish
    Sprawling and sometimes confusing, but its premise is charming and not at all far-fetched.
  76. West of the Jordan River
    Through interviews with Israeli politicians, and Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank, West of the Jordan River gives voice to peace-seeking residents on both sides of the conflict.
  77. Rabid
    It took (Cronenberg) several films to come into his own as a filmmaker, but even his earliest work reflects his obsessive interest in the human body as raw material that can be transformed -- for better or for worse -- by strong emotions. [08 Jun 2004, p.E3]
    • The New York Times
  78. Sonic the Hedgehog 3
    It’s hard to settle on what’s more bombastic: Carrey’s admittedly virtuoso double act, or the teeming computer graphics gadgetry of death and destruction spilling out of every corner of the screen.
  79. Genius
    It’s dispiriting to see a movie about interesting real-life characters reduce them to clichés, making them less vivid, less fascinating, less charismatic than they must have been.
  80. The Crazies
    Mr. Romero is executive producer of the new film. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have his style or sense of humor.
  81. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
    Elm Street 4' does have an endless onslaught of astonishing, often grotesque special effects .Mr. Harlin only has to keep things moving, which he does with restless camera work, swirling high above Freddy and his victims. Freddy, who says I am eternal, seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, immune to directors and scripts.
  82. Chasing Portraits
    Chasing Portraits is small and subtle, with some missed opportunities and occasionally inexpert filmmaking. But it’s not an insignificant effort, and Ms. Rynecki’s cause is admirable.
  83. Iron Will
    Despite this lively history, the material seldom rises above the level of upbeat platitudes.
  84. Ibiza
    The most interesting thing about Ibiza, not to get too highfalutin, is its positive treatment of female desire.
  85. Adam
    The humor is delicate, and the performances sweet and sure; the script (by the director, Max Mayer) is not entirely predictable, and the Manhattan locations (lovingly photographed by Seamus Tierney) have a starry-eyed glaze.
  86. The Unknown Woman
    Ms. Rappoport’s sturdy performance helps keep this outlandish melodrama from collapsing into unintended comedy.
  87. Eleven Minutes
    Might be described as a low-rent answer to Douglas Keeve's documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, "Unzipped," a movie that also revealed the fundamental silliness of fashion, though it had some glamour attached.
  88. Moon Shadow
    A modest and thoughtful movie, and if it doesn't quite break new ground in addressing its difficult subject, it at least does not cheapen it.
  89. Claire Dolan
    Cartlidge's beautifully still performance, mournful one moment, defiant the next, lets you see into Claire's soul without editorializing or begging for our empathy.
  90. Cabin Fever
    Sustains such a palpable mood of foreboding until the end.
  91. A Chronicle of Corpses
    Mr. McElhinney has created a movie that is not without the flaws endemic in low-budget productions but still projects an amazing degree of stylistic assurance and originality.
  92. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    "Croupier," the director's comeback film of 2000, which also starred Mr. Owen, is a riskier, more interesting exercise in English noir than I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, but the new film, whose title comes from a Warren Zevon song, nonetheless serves as a fine stylistic showpiece.
  93. Santa Smokes
    Ms. Hulslander is often charming, but Mr. Schauder's Johnny is one of those narcissistic characters whom, inexplicably, everybody in the movie adores.
  94. Greedy Lying Bastards
    Collated for momentum, the film’s many interviews, wide-ranging archival footage and montage of modern ecological disasters form a blunt but carefully positioned instrument. And despite a bit of Michael Moore-style nonsense at the end the tightly edited narrative displays a reach (nine countries) and clarity of composition that hold the attention.
  95. The Cut
    Too many scenes feel routine or clichéd, sometimes even those depicting extreme experiences.
  96. Radioactive
    Radioactive, a thoughtful, very watchable fictionalized portrait of Marie Curie, tries hard to nudge the halo off its subject. Given her endeavors and accolades — including two Nobel Prizes — this simple, humanizing effort proves tough but also feels necessary.
  97. How the West Was Won
    With little or no imagination and, indeed, with no pictorial style, despite the fact that the three directors were Henry Hathaway, George Marshall and John Ford, they have fashioned a lot of random episodes, horribly written by James Webb, into a mat of outdoor adventure vignettes that tell you nothing of how the West was really won.
  98. The Wandering Earth II
    Losing all of the glee of its predecessor, the movie instead offers nearly three hours of convoluted story lines, undercooked themes and a tangle of confused, glaringly state-approved political subtext.
  99. Winner
    A sweeping biopic that presents her as something like an American Girl doll for the “I’m not like other girls” set.
  100. Race
    If Race is a standard inspirational biopic that exalts the legend of an athletic hero, at least it doesn’t soft-pedal the racism that Owens encountered at every turn.
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