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. The Girl on the Train
    The film can be described as a character study or a fictionalized slice of terribly real life. Mostly, though, it is an inquiry into the mysteries of other people.
  2. Soundtrack for a Revolution
    It’s the kind of film that will have audiences clapping and singing along. And why not? The images and stories may be familiar, but it’s history worth retelling.
  3. Creation
    What we see on screen is a lumbering, flat-footed fancy-dress melodrama.
  4. To Save a Life
    The film would be a mere nuisance if not for its shameless exploitation of school shootings to advance its agenda.
  5. Tooth Fairy
    Watching the first half-hour of Tooth Fairy is like reaching into a grab bag of novelties, as the movie unveils its tricks... After that, the wit more or less evaporates, replaced by bloated sentimentality and clumsy plot exposition.
  6. The Paranoids
    Just like its main character, this smart, slyly witty movie with few laughs undersells itself.
  7. Room and a Half
    Despite its moments of pathos and its expressions of homesickness, A Room and a Half, is an uplifting comedy. Like Fellini’s screen reminiscences, it is suffused with a hearty appreciation of the world’s absurdity, along with a hungry appreciation of its beauty.
  8. Pop Star on Ice
    One part hagiography and two parts psychotherapy. Together they showcase a talent both formidable and erratic, its bright and shining peaks sliding inexplicably into valleys of disaster.
  9. House of Numbers: Anatomy of an Epidemic
    Trafficking in irresponsible inferences and unsupported conclusions, the filmmaker Brent Leung offers himself as suave docent through a globe-trotting pseudo-investigation that should raise the hackles of anyone with even a glancing knowledge of the basic rules of reasoning.
  10. The Book of Eli
    The movie keeps you watching and generally engaged.
  11. Fish Tank
    The contradictions of adolescence have rarely been conveyed with such authenticity and force.
  12. The Spy Next Door
    The outtakes are not all that great but still better than anything else in the movie.
  13. 44 Inch Chest
    Think of 44 Inch Chest as a piece of chamber music and you can compensate for the thinness of its story and the lack of visual distinction.
  14. Daybreakers
    The narrative may flag, but the doomsday atmosphere and George Liddle’s production design remain vivid until the final, blood-splattered reel.
  15. Youth in Revolt
    Sweet and slight and often charming coming-of-age tale.
  16. Leap Year
    What makes Leap Year so singularly dispiriting is precisely that it is bad without distinction -- so witless, charmless and unimaginative that it can be described as a movie only in a strictly technical sense.
  17. Waiting for Armageddon
    Respectfully and without dramatization (the ideas are electric enough), the directors observe a cross section of articulate evangelicals and accompany a Christian group on a revealing trip to Israel.
  18. Wonderful World
    The major miscalculation in Wonderful World is the presence of a dream figure, known as the Man (Philip Baker Hall)...he throws this delicate, intelligent film, which at its best suggests a muted hybrid of “The Visitor” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” off balance.
  19. In Search of Memory
    It is an engrossing portrait all the same, a generous introduction to someone worth knowing, who knows an awful lot.
  20. Garbage Dreams
    Garbage Dreams records the tremblings of a culture at a crossroads.
  21. The White Ribbon
    An unnerving but unsatisfying chronicle of a German village filled with hidden cruelty, set on the eve of World War I.
  22. The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond
    With its strained, quasi-poetic language that fitfully tries to soar, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond is a significant, though less than monumental feat of reclamation.
  23. The Chaser
    While it could stand to lose 20 minutes and several plot twists, Mr. Na’s debut manages to be thought-provoking and adventurous while providing solid thrills.
  24. Sherlock Holmes
    There are worse things than loutish, laddish cool, and as a series of poses and stunts, Sherlock Holmes is intermittently diverting.
  25. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
    It’s a full three-ring affair, complete with puffs of smoke, glitter and grunge, some hocus-pocus, mumbo jumbo and even a dwarf.
  26. It's Complicated
    Pleasurable, daffy if at times daft.
  27. Sita Sings the Blues
    And the ingenuity of “Sita” — is dazzling. Not busy, or overwhelming, or eye-popping. Just affecting, surprising and a lot of fun.
  28. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
    The earlier “Alvin” movie made more than $217 million just in the United States. It’s hard to imagine this somewhat confused sequel doing as well.
  29. Police, Adjective
    So much in this meticulous and moving film is between the lines, and almost nothing is by the book.
  30. Did You Hear About the Morgans?
    There are barely enough titter-worthy one-liners in Marc Lawrence's good-natured romantic comedy Did You Hear About the Morgans? to prevent it from sinking under the weight of its clichés.
  31. Avatar
    Glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.
  32. Nine
    Straining to capture artistic frenzy, it descends into vulgar chaos, less a homage to Federico Fellini’s “8 ½” (its putative inspiration) than a travesty.
  33. The Young Victoria
    Despite the filmmakers’ efforts to persuade us that The Young Victoria is a serious work, and despite some tense moments and gunfire, the movie’s pleasures are as light as its story. No matter. Albert may never rip Victoria’s bodice, but he does eventually loosen it, to her delight and ours.
  34. Crazy Heart
    A small movie perfectly scaled to the big performance at its center.
  35. A Town Called Panic
    ATown Called Panic is an adventure story as fast-paced and exciting as any currently in theaters.
  36. Ricky
    The deeper Ricky plunges into allegory, the shakier its grasp of the material.
  37. Invictus
    It’s an exciting sports movie, an inspiring tale of prejudice overcome and, above all, a fascinating study of political leadership.
  38. The Lovely Bones
    The filmmakers’ evident affection for the book expresses itself as a desperate scramble to include as much of it as possible, which leaves the movie feeling both overcrowded and thin.
  39. A Single Man
    While A Single Man has its flaws, many of these fade in view of the performance and the power of Isherwood’s story.
  40. The Slammin' Salmon
    Has its share of funny moments. But it also has its share of tired ones, like the subplot involving the inadvertent swallowing of a ring.
  41. Tenderness
    Tenderness is a movie undone by its formulaic plot conventions, and its need to give its star more screen time than his characters merits.
  42. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
    While watching Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done you might be tempted to murmur, “My Werner, My Werner, What Have Ye Done.”
  43. Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year
    Mr. Kapoor, a heartthrob who has quickly become a star playing cads, turns in a skillfully understated performance. His Harpreet is an old-school hero: solid, righteous, compassionate. You can’t help cheering for him.
  44. Up in the Air
    One of the pleasures of Up in the Air is that its actresses share the frame with Mr. Clooney as equals, not props
  45. The Last Station
    The kind of movie that gives literature a bad name. Not because it undermines the dignity of a great writer and his work, but because it is so self-consciously eager to flaunt its own gravity and good taste.
  46. Transylmania
    Transylmania, a vampire-hunter, college road trip sex comedy, has a problem: someone has drained all the laughs out of it.
  47. Brothers
    A smart, well-meaning project -- never quite pulls itself together. It has a vague, half-finished feeling, as if it had not figured out what it was trying to do. Which may amount to a kind of realism -- an accurate reflection of where we are in Afghanistan.
  48. Armored
    An unabashed B movie: basic, brutal and sometimes clumsy, but far from dumb, and not bad at all.
  49. Everybody's Fine
    The queasiness produced by this sentimental weepie builds into a wave of nausea during its interminable finale.
  50. Giant
    It is an appealing, gently comedic prologue to a love story.
  51. Breaking Point
    After a particularly brutal, attention-grabbing start, Breaking Point quickly devolves into a flavorless stew of murder, corruption, blackmail and baby tossing.
  52. Serious Moonlight
    A very shallow comedy. For the real thing, rent “The Ref,” in which Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis, with a boost from Glynis Johns, set the house on fire.
  53. Big River Man
    As his attention to detail and beauty shots prove, Mr. Maringouin has a terrific eye: he brings you close to Mr. Strel, sometimes within panting distance, without forgetting the larger, lovelier world.
  54. Paa
    It’s stunt acting and frequently more creepy than moving, but it also gives Paa it’s weird I’m-my-own-grandpa charge.
  55. The Strip
    As depressing as the résumés of its 9-to-5 characters, The Strip sweats to wring laughs from overworked themes and underwhelming performances.
  56. Until the Light Takes Us
    Absorbing, low-key documentary.
  57. Le jour avant le lendemain
    Frustratingly sketchy partly because it is not finally a survival tale but a mystical evocation of the power of Inuit mythology, and how the passing down of ancient wisdom can sustain the human spirit in the direst circumstances. But the unanswered questions still nag.
  58. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
    Rebecca Miller’s fourth film is a wry, acutely observant drama.
  59. Home
    Home is, as with so many family stories, also something of a disaster movie: the walls shudder and crack, and eventually so do the people inside them.
  60. The Road
    Engrossing and at times impressive, a pretty good movie that is disappointing to the extent that it could have been great. Is this the way the world ends? With polite applause?
  61. The Princess and the Frog
    It’s not easy being green. But to judge from how this hand-drawn movie addresses, or rather strenuously avoids, race, it is a lot more difficult to be black.
  62. Old Dogs
    This imbecilic, mean-spirited farce, which sneers at adults, leaves you wondering: where are the Three Stooges when we really need them?
  63. Ninja Assassin
    This saga, set in Berlin, is more committed to its bloodletting than to any of its characters.
  64. Me and Orson Welles
    Art is a fairy tale we choose to believe in, and this movie, a fiction confected about real people, is too good not to be true.
  65. The Blind Side
    The film, not unsurprisingly for a holiday- (and football-) season release from a major Hollywood studio, plays this story straight down the middle, shedding nuance and complication in favor of maximum uplift.
  66. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
    Mr. Herzog’s film is a pulpy, glorious mess. Its maniacal unpredictability is such a blast that it reminds you just how tidy and dull most crime thrillers are these days.
  67. Broken Embraces
    Broken Embraces leaves the viewer in a contradictory state, a mixture of devastation and euphoria, amusement and dismay that deserves its own clinical designation. Call it Almodóvaria, a syndrome from which some of us are more than happy to suffer.
  68. The Twilight Saga: New Moon
    The big tease turns into the long goodbye in The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the juiceless, near bloodless sequel.
  69. Planet 51
    Agreeable but flagrantly unoriginal.
  70. Defamation
    Disorganized and somewhat annoying.
  71. Fix
    Propelled by an eccentric cast of characters and increasingly seamy locations, Fix dashes headlong through Los Angeles with a little charm and a lot of verve.
  72. The Sun
    The movie is best understood not in banal docudrama terms but as an impressionistic portrait of a man who, stripped of power, is revealed as grotesquely human.
  73. Mammoth
    Mr. Moodysson has never met a pleasure he didn’t want to punish.
  74. The Missing Person
    Sluggish, stylized and frequently washed in a bilious green tint, The Missing Person is yet oddly irresistible.
  75. The War on Kids
    Offering neither balance nor solutions (a segment on the overuse of medications like Ritalin is especially powerful, but especially in need of counterargument), The War on Kids questions what kind of citizens we are producing.
  76. Red Cliff
    While handsome and intelligent and perfectly easy to sit through, never really approaches the visceral tug of Mr. Woo’s Hong Kong hits.
  77. Fantastic Mr. Fox
    In some ways his (Anderson) most fully realized and satisfying film. Once you adjust to its stop-and-start rhythms and its scruffy looks, you can appreciate its wit, its beauty and the sly gravity of its emotional undercurrents.
  78. 2012
    Despite the frenetic action scenes, the movie sags, done in by multiple story lines that undercut one another and by the heaviness of its conceit.
  79. The Messenger
    No movie can convey the truth of war to those of us who have not lived through it, but The Messenger, precisely by acknowledging just how hard it is to live with that truth, manages to bring it at least partway home.
  80. Pirate Radio
    Stuffed with playful character actors and carpeted with wall-to-wall tunes, the film makes for easy viewing and easier listening.
  81. Dare
    As it develops, Dare lays out some interesting psychological puzzles, though the filmmakers lack the technique to explore them as thoroughly as you might wish.
  82. William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
    Although the film, with its home movies and family reminiscences, portrays him as a heroic crusader for justice, it is by no means a hagiography of a man who earned widespread contempt late in his career for defending pariahs.
  83. Oh My God
    The film, which Mr. Rodger directed, wrote, produced and photographed on location in nearly two dozen countries, is the documentary equivalent of a spiritually angled coffee-table book of world travels
  84. Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
    It’s the type of film you might expect to see at a fund-raising dinner or a convention banquet, not in a commercial theater. That said, it’s a very well-made piece of boosterism.
  85. Uncertainty
    A taut, skillful exercise in cinematic clockwork.
  86. Women in Trouble
    The amateurish production values might be pardonable if the clichés -- the hard-core porn star with the soft heart, the therapist who needs to heal herself -- inside the poorly lighted, badly shot images weren’t so absurd and often insulting.
  87. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
    Nimble and self-assured as Mr. Daniels’s direction may be, he could not make you believe in “Precious” unless you were able to believe in Precious herself. You will.
  88. The Men Who Stare at Goats
    Likable, lightweight, absurdist comedy.
  89. The Box
    Sincere and sinister and inevitably ambitious, a serious work that insists on its own seriousness even when it edges toward the preposterous.
  90. The Fourth Kind
    May be humorless, paranoid nonsense, but its biggest failure is its inability to scare.
  91. A Christmas Carol
    A Christmas Carol -- I mean the source material, without a corporate possessive attached to it -- remains among the most moving works of holiday literature, and Mr. Zemeckis has remained true to its finest sentiments. He is an innovator, but his traditionalism is what makes this movie work.
  92. 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.
  93. Collapse
    His well-rehearsed rhetoric is shockingly persuasive, and since the majority of his premises are verifiable, any weakness in his argument lies in inferences so terrifying that reasonable listeners may find themselves taking his advice and stocking up on organic seeds. (Those with no access to land can, postapocalypse, use them as currency.)
  94. Splinterheads
    Splinterheads gains traction from an eclectic cast that knows how to work a line.
  95. That Evening Sun
    Hal Holbrook strips the stereotype of the grumpy old man of sentimental shtick and cutesy old-codger mannerisms.
  96. Turning Green
    Ends up stranded in the wilderness between comedy and rushed, halfhearted melodrama.
  97. The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day
    Like its predecessor, All Saints Day will, if nothing else, be a cult item for Roman Catholic schoolboys; the next sequel, blatantly set up, should arrive no later than 2019.
  98. Gentlemen Broncos
    Timing, good jokes and characters you can laugh with and at are mostly missing from Gentlemen Broncos.
  99. The House of the Devil
    Mr. West shows a real gift for the genre, particularly in his ability to generate dread with pinpricks rather than bludgeoning shocks, something even veterans twice his age have difficulty achieving. After years of vivisectionist splatter, here is a horror movie with real shivers.
  100. Labor Day
    The result is, more than anything else, a slickly produced 76-minute commercial for the union; to call it a documentary is to stretch the term almost beyond meaning.
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